2009/11/11 Jan de Groot <jan@jgc.homeip.net>
libtool always used to be the default and will stay this way. Some packages require .la files, and it's a hard job detecting them when they get removed by default. Showing a warning with namcap is much easier than finding out the other way around.
From this list posted above, I know at least mpg123, libsasl and libgphoto2 require libtool files to load their plugins. I think fam and gnutls kept the .la files for no clear reason. Fedora was the first to start deleting all these .la files, they kept the files in these packages. Nowadays Fedora removes the .la files from gnutls and gamin too, so we might do that in the near future also. Note that removing these files also means rebuilding all packages with .la files that include it. For libarchive we kept the .la files because static linking would fail without them. We don't do static linking with libarchive anymore, so if we ever decide to --disable-static, we should also remove the .la files in it. Fedora still keeps .la files in neon and even patches them to include less crap, so I guess they have a reason to keep the files. Moonlight doesn't contain .la files, and about kdemod-meanwhile: I don't use kdemod, so I can't comment on it.
Awesome; exactly what I wanted to know, thanks guys!