[aur-general] status of libtool slaying

[Jan de Groot]

On Wed, 2009-11-11 at 12:34 +0800, Ray Rashif wrote:
> I remember the consensus used to be !libtool by default and now it's libtool
> in makepkg.conf, so what happened?
> 
> In any case, on my system:
> 
> ~$ for i in `ls /usr/lib/*.la`; do pacman -Qo $i | awk '{print $5}'; done |
> sort -u
> 
> fam
> gnutls
> kdemod-meanwhile
> libarchive
> libgphoto2
> libsasl
> moonlight
> mpg123
> neon

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.