https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=421322
User matz@novell.com added comment
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=421322#c28
--- Comment #28 from Michael Matz 2008-09-01 06:29:58 MDT ---
Cristian, as much as I like your cleanups, please be more careful with
spreading misleading information. .la files _do_ provide vital information for
static linking that isn't found anywhere else, namely dependencies. For ELF
DSOs the dependencies are also in the DT_NEEDED entries, that's why (on
ELF!) .la files are redundant for them.
Static libs don't have such means, so the dependencies need to be written
somewhere else, either in the mind of the developers (so to spell them out
explicitely in Makefiles), that's fragile, or in pkg-config files (not everyone
uses them, and they aren't much better than .la files anyway), or in the .la
files.
Sometimes the dependencies of static libs will already be fulfilled trivially,
or at least in all circumstances in which they happen to be currently used,
in that case the .la files are then useless. But not in the general case.
Having said all that, of the two fixes for this problem, either retaining
the .la file or removing the .a file the latter is the better option.
Currently we have about 760 .a files in the system on i386, and I guess at
least half of them are useless.
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