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

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Oct  2, 2006, Enrico Scholz <enrico.scholz at informatik.tu-chemnitz.de> wrote:

>> - If -la was needed for building libb, then there exists a real
>> dependency between liba and libb and libb.la is correct about that.

> No, this dependency does not need to be handled explicitly with dynamic
> libraries.

And it's actually harmful if you move the .so link to the -devel
package, which is the general recommendation.

Consider that foo-devel provides libfoo.so, which is a link to
libfoo.so.0 provided by foo-libs.

Consider that libfoo.so.0 depends on libbar.so.0, provided by
bar-libs.

If you link with -lfoo without libtool, it just works.

If you link with -lfoo with libtool, and libtool finds the .la file
that lists -lbar as a dependency of libfoo.la, then you lose unless
you list bar-devel as a dependency of foo-devel.

Is the absence of such an otherwise-unnecessary dependency a bug in
package foo?

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Secretary for FSF Latin America        http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}