On 10/30/18, Hans Malissa <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks for the explanation. So is it generally a good practice to search for > any *.a and *.la files that might have gotten installed while building & > installing a package, and to delete them manually?
It really depends on your goals. Some distributions concentrate on trying to only use statically linked libraries or give preference to statically linked libraries while many other distributions prefer the shared libraries. As Ken mentioned, for security reasons, it's easier to update one shared library then to go through and rebuild everything linked to a static library. There are advantages to static libraries though. Systems like Bedrock Linux would not work without the basic parts of the system being statically linked. Rescue systems tend to use static linking. There was a project called sta.li at suckless.org a while back. They offered several reasons why they preferred creating a statically linked Linux distribution. Some of the smaller Linux distributions using musl as their C library are typically statically linked for similar reasons. In many cases, it also makes it easier to share a program you built with someone else who may not have the same dependencies on his/her system. There are pros and cons to each approach and one approach may work better for certain situations than the other. I tend to build my packages in a separate directory using DESTDIR when available. I add commands to delete .la or other files as needed to my build scripts so it's done automatically. Then I install the finished tarball on my system. I don't typically delete the .a files because I sometimes prefer to use them over the shared files (depending on the circumstances). I keep track of dependencies in my build scripts. So, if I need to rebuild a bunch of packages that share a dependency, it's not a real hardship. Most of the process can be automated. I do delete the .la files on a regular basis because they're created/used by GNU autotools and may not play nice with other build tools brought into the mix. I also have no personal use for them. Sincerely, Laura http://www.distasis.com/cpp -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
