Re: ORBit-2.la not found

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas apestaart org> writes: 
> It looks to me that two ways are possible :
> a) if every package installs it's .la file, everything's fine
> b) if none of them installs them, everything's fine

Exactly.

> 
> At the moment it seems like Ximian and Red Hat have started to remove .la 
> files from their packages, but aren't quite done yet, causing lots of 
> libtool link breakage while compiling.
> 
> Also, I wanted to ask for some statement from people in the know from both 
> Red Hat and Ximian : is the plan to remove ALL .la files from -devel 
> packages everywhere, or not ?

Yes. I consider it a bug when a Red Hat gnome package contains a .la
file, and I take it out.

On Linux, the .la files do nothing useful. Everything works fine
without them (everything _has_ to work fine without them, or libtool
couldn't link to libraries that weren't compiled with libtool).  So
all they are is an extra way for things to break.

I believe the theory is that they could do pkg-config type of work for
you, but libtool just is not a reasonable pkg-config replacement
(doesn't address configure.in aspects, or cflags aspects, etc.), so we
don't care about that feature.

Ultimately what someone should do is write a sane system that is a
combination of libtool and pkg-config, but, well. Someday.
As the pkg-config author I don't understand all the linker stuff, and
the libtool guys don't understand all the pkg-config goals, and
neither of us has extra time. ;-)

Havoc