Packaging policy for libtool .la files

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
>>>>>> "MS" == Michael Schwendt <mschwendt at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> MS> $ rpm -ql ImageMagick | grep '\.la$'|wc -l
> MS> 102
> 
> MS> It's an indication that hardly any reviewers/packagers follow the
> MS> guidelines.
> 
> Very far from fair to mention ImageMagick.  The issue was addressed in
> the ImageMagic merge review, which points back to earlier problems
> when the .la files were originally removed from the package.  The only
> real sin here is the fact that it's not explicitly documented in the
> spec file, only mentioned in the changelog entries.
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=225897
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=185237
> 
> "The package breaks without the .la files" is a reasonable exemption
> to the guidelines.  It's pretty easy to see what's going on if you
> actually look at the merge review instead of simply accusing accusing
> people of blindly ignoring the guidelines.
> 

Attaching a patch that allows convert, at least, to work without *.la
files installed to show how much coding work is involved in fixing these.

This still leaves several questions, though:

* Is it the packagers job to fix things like this?  It's certainly a
Fedora-specific packaging policy to remove *.la files, so this is not
something that we can force on upstream.

* Is this something we should carry local patches to fix if upstream
won't accept our changes?

Note:  This patch fixes convert for our purposes but it's not ready to
be sent upstream yet.  Upstream will want *.la files to work on
platforms that are more limited than we are and can't support loading
directly from the *.so file.  Also, there's a couple uses of lt_dlopen()
that might better be reqorked to lt_dlopenext() if upstream is amenable.

-Toshio
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