Re: RFC: librep without .la files, rep-gtk combined

[James Ralston <qralston+ml sawfish andrew cmu edu>]

On 2011-04-01 22:48:20 +0300 "Kim B. Heino" <b bbbs net> wrote:

> While trying to get Sawfish into Fedora I had to remove libtool's
> .la files from rpm.  By doing that everything broke.
> 
> ...
> 
> I applied these two patches, recompiled everything and removed
> all .la files: Sawfish works fine for me!
> 
> Comments? Ideas? Anything?

You *might* be able to get the packages approved as-is, if you pointed
out that...

    1.  the *.la files are part of the packages' ABI and removing them
        breaks it, and

    2.  you will work with upstream to remove the dependencies on the
        *.la files.

However, it would be far better for librep/rep-gtk/sawfish to cease
using *.la files.  None of (librep, rep-gtk, sawfish) seems to use
libltdl, so removing the *.la files shouldn't be that painful--as
you've discovered.

Besides, libtool archives have a long history of breaking things, and
many (most?) Linux distros have already banned them.  E.g.:

http://www.archlinux.org/news/operation-libtool-slay-in-testing/