On Sun, 2012-01-08 at 23:08 +0000, Ken Moffat wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 08, 2012 at 10:41:36PM +0000, Matt Burgess wrote:
> >
> > Ah, good catch. I did look for the static libs but didn't see them
> > immediately. Fixed in r9706. Incidentally, is there a similar trick
> > for preventing those pesky libtool archives (.la) from being
> > built/installed? Are they actually useful on a Linux box?
> >
> No, and "in theory, no". At one time my buildscripts had a
> function to remove the libtool archives, because everyone said they
> weren't needed on linux (and fedora used to remove them, generally).
> But I stopped doing that, both because of broken packages (I think
> mpeg123, and ImageMagick (for its delegates), and because of failed
> updates (i.e. recompiling a patched package, or a newer version, to
> fix a known vulnerability sometimes forced me to recompile
> dependencies so that I could use the .la files.
>
> At that time I was building on i686 (occasionally), x86_64, and
> either, or both, ppc and ppc64. For i686 it might still be possible
> to delete them, but I'v needed them on both x86_64 and ppc{,64} - not
> always for the same packages. I thought about renaming them, the way
> I do for static libs I can't get rid of but might, perhaps, need for
> a later package, but in the end I decided that was a waste of effort.
>
> BTW, I thought we (as in 'the book') were happy to let people have
> static libraries, even though some of us loathe them on our own
> machines ;-)
I thought so too, but read your reply to my commit as a complaint so
removed them. Maybe I'm a little sensitive :-)
Seriously though, I would like to see LFS consider removing as many
static libs as possible. If nothing else, it helps massively in keeping
systems secure as you only have to upgrade the *1* copy of the
compromised library rather than trawl through logs to see what packages
brought in a copy of the static library. It also helps with the usual
shared library advantages of only having one copy loaded and one copy on
disk, though the performance and space benefits are admittedly probably
negligible on today's machines.
Regards,
Matt.
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