.la and FE guidelines

[Rex Dieter]

Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-01-09 at 00:10 +0100, Chitlesh GOORAH wrote:
>> Hello
>> I'm suspecting a leakage in the FE guidelines concerning .la for
>> kcontrol plugins.
>>
>> kcontrol plugins require .la files in order to work properly.
>> Example:
>> 1) https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=221733
>> 2) https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=221015#c7
>>
>> I think that these guidelines should be properly documented in that perspective.
>> Any comments on this ?

> Sorry, I got busy after figuring out just the arts piece of this puzzle.
> I have some time right now to go through and fix things to not
> require .la files.  However, I know nothing of the kde project so I need
> a little bit of advice.
> 
> * Do you think this work would be appreciated upstream or accepted
> within the Fedora kde packages?

upstream?  Highly likely not, since kde-3.5.x is pretty much in strict
maintenance mode now.

> * Can you help me figure out which packages I need to look into and how
> to test that the problems are gone once I patch them?
> 
> If so I'll open up a bug in bugzilla.r.c where we can track this.

IMO, it's just plain not worth the pain involved.  By the time we get a
good handle on this in core kde and supporting applications, kde4 will
likely be around the corner (which, thankfully, at least wrt, no longer
uses libtool).

> P.S. For Chitlesh: The Packaging Committee has discussed this:
> http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/LibtoolArchives but
> not yet passed it.  The fact that kde apps need .la's is arguably a bug
> in upstream's code but I don't know whether we determined there was any
> negative's from allowing them when they were a part of a loadable module
> rather than a shared library.

Afaik, there are no negatives with the updated libtoolarchives proposal,
but clearly, I was in the minority, which is why the proposal, as yet,
hasn't passed.

-- Rex