Some thoughts on the modularization effort

[Keith Packard]

On Sun, 2005-04-03 at 16:09 -0700, Alan Coopersmith wrote:

> I've not had time to look into it much, but have built software on
> Solaris that uses libtools and it mostly seems to work for the simple
> cases, though *.la files need to be deleted everywhere they show up or
> things get really broken.   Since rm *.la is so easy, I've never taken
> the time to look into what they are supposed to do and what's going wrong.
>

The .la files serve few purposes these days, and I'd certainly like to
avoid installing them by default.  They can cause considerable trouble
as they hard-code paths to other libraries which causes problems when
libraries are moved.

They provide dependency information which is useful for a.out-based
systems, and for linking static libraries on ELF systems where
applications themselves do not have complete dependencies.

I think pkg-config is a better solution to this as it doesn't embed
static paths for other libraries in the configuration, but rather
dynamically discovers appropriate library paths at configuration time.

The final use for .la files is with libltdl for systems which provide no
native dlopen-like functionality.  X.org doesn't use libltdl.

-keith

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