[Fedora-packaging] Re: libtool(.la) archive policy proposal

[Rex Dieter]

Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Oct 2006 12:32:12 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:

>> From a different view: *.la files aren't much different than *.pc
>> files, in fact they contain a subset of their information. One
>> wouldn't argue to remove all *.pc files because some may contain too
>> many references to libs.
> 
> These are broken and partially have their origin in "extreme static
> linking". (For static linking you need the full chain of -lfoo arguments,
> as everything else would result in missing symbols).
> 
> pkgconfig "Requires" in libfoo.pc should list the options that are needed
> to build with libfoo, NOT the options that were used to build libfoo. With
> sane linking, the shared libfoo has a run-time dep already on any other
> libs it needs and is linked against, e.g. liba and libb, so adding -la -lb
> and so on is not needed when linking shared against -lfoo.

Thankfully, pkgconfig has both
Libs:
Libs.private:
The former for *real* lib dependencies, the latter for private/static 
ones.  Unfortunately, not many developers are aware-of or use 
Libs.private, but it least the feature is there.  I'm not aware of any 
similar functionality for libtool (yet).

-- Rex