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