"Dan Nicholson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Looks like I didn't look closely enough. For sure fedora removes all > the .la files unless there is a specific reason to need them. I > thought debian was too, but it looks like they keep them. My fault.
Debian decides this on a maintainer-by-maintainer basis. Usually Debian keeps them until they cause problems and then removes them. They often do cause problems, so many library dev packages (but not all) don't include them any more. The most frequent problem caused by *.la files is that they add a pile of unnecessary dependencies to shared libraries, which further entangles package dependencies and makes upgrades unnecessarily hard. (This is the long-standing problem of including all dependencies required for static libraries, which aren't needed for shared libraries on systems that handle transitive dependency closures when loading shared libraries.) -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> _______________________________________________ http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/libtool