Ossama Othman wrote: > Certainly libtool is fully capable of linking against shared libraries which > don't have .la files, but being a mere shell script it can add considerably > to the build time of a libtool using package if that shellscript has to derive > all this infomation from first principles for each library every time it is > linked.
Hm. If all the gain we get is the possible advantage in speed of reading/sourcing a .la file versus running objdump -p, I'll have to oppose this proposal to ship .la files with debian. That's got to be on the order of only a second or so per build saved. > With the advent of libtool-1.4 (and to a lesser extent libtool-1.3), the .la > files will also store information about inter-library dependencies which > cannot necessarily be derived after the .la file is deleted. Thomas can > probably explain this a lot better than I can, so I won't muddy the waters > with a poor example of my own. As far as I can see linux's shared library format allows specification of inter-library dependancies. So I hope an example is forthcoming.. > objdump will get soname information from an elf library, and version numbers > are encoded in the filenames. Of course, this doesn't help much if the > version numbering system is not known, or is inconsistent (say with mixed > libtool and non-libtool versioned libs where the .la files have been removed). This looks like a real benefit. -- see shy jo
