Re: Core updates status

[Felix Lechner via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." <guix-devel@gnu.org>]

Hi Andreas,

On Wed, May 08 2024, Andreas Enge wrote:

> I am a little bit confused by the suggestion; you mean removing all
> .la files from all packages?

I don't mean to answer for Josselin but at least in Debian, which seems
to be acceptable as a reference from time to time, there has been a
long-standing practice not to ship .la files. [1]

There are several exceptions to that rule, chiefly when the files are
for dynamically loaded modules used only by a particular program. The
dynamic loader library libltdl (which ships with Libtool but is losing
popularity) requires them.

My understanding is that pkg-config [5] and pkgconf [6] do more or less
the same thing.

In one of Debian's QA tools called Lintian, we tolerated .la files but
issued fault indicators for shipping prerequisite information [2] or for
inconsistent libdirs. [3]

The exact heuristics are available here. [4]

Kind regards
Felix

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/LAFileRemoval
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/blob/master/tags/n/non-empty-dependency_libs-in-la-file.tag
[3] https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/blob/master/tags/i/incorrect-libdir-in-la-file.tag
[4] https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/blob/master/lib/Lintian/Check/BuildSystems/Libtool/LaFile.pm
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pkg-config
[6] https://github.com/pkgconf/pkgconf