On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 04:15:01PM +0200, Christiaan Welvaart wrote: > >https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/RemovingLaFiles > > "... but the dirty hacks that jhbuild plays ..." > > Problems with dirty hacks are NOT a valid reason to remove libtool > convenience libraries aka .la files.
Seems you skipped the initial bit, where it explains that the .la has the full path. > >Seems some distributions misunderstand the need and changed the wiki > >page. Removing .la files is needed however, otherwise you'll quickly mix > >distribution installed libraries and self-compiled libraries. > > What are you talking about here? "The particular problem with these .la files is that they have hardcoded paths in them. So, for example, if /usr/lib/libgnome-menu.so just contains the information that it requires libglib-2.0.so.0 but /usr/lib/libgnome-menu.la says that it wants /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.la, it causes libtool to link against /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so at link time. This is fine for a lot of typical build scenarios, but the dirty hacks that jhbuild plays to get it to sandbox your system understandably breaks. " > >Difficulty is that this only works when you remove *all* .la files. If > >only one is left compilation is broken. > > It is more likely that your build system is broken. If you do not > want to link against system libraries, remove /lib and /usr/lib from > the library search dirs list. That's not enough, the .la files add libraries in /lib and /usr/lib. Fedora has for instance already removed the .la files. Other distributions are working on it (even Debian). -- Regards, Olav