[PATCH]: creating la files also for static libraries

[Ralf Habacker]

Am Dienstag, 25. Oktober 2005 12:35 schrieb Thiago Macieira:
> Jarosław Staniek wrote:
> >> How about we don't generate .la files for anything at all?

Are there any other types beside shared (including module, kioslave and so 
one)  and static (including convencience) ?  

> >> As I said some time ago, the only purpose I see for them is to track
> >> the dependencies from static libraries, which is a usecase I'd rather
> >> not see in KDE.

May be true for unix, not for windows. See below. 

> >Would be fine for me too. BTW, do you also think about removing
> > requirement for .la files in libltdl? In case of kdelibs3 ("qmake"
> > times) I was just copying .la files to win32 partition to make sure
> > KTrader can find KDE services. Maybe, in that case, .desktop files are
> > enough.
>
> libltdl should be able to find the modules without the .la files, I hope.

not on windows for versioned libraries. How do libltdl could find a library 
libkdecore-6.dll, when the requested name is kdecore and not symlinks are 
used ? Only by a directory search which require additional time and may lead 
to the wrong results, if more than one library version is installed. 

Or does anyone have a better idea ? 

> KTrader should have a compile-time constant that sets the platform-defined
> suffix for loadable modules (dll, so, dylib, etc.), so that it can check
> whether the file pointed to by a .desktop file actually exists.
>
> Aside from that, the .la files are a convenience for the build system, in
> that they can check for a library's existence by verifying that the .la
> file exists: in that case, we could have empty .la files just to tag, but
> I wouldn't want them to be installed or have any content.

Why not ? If any other external KDE applications uses autotools based 
buildsystem it requires valid libtool files.May be it be also good to support 
pkgconfig too for the similar reasons. 

Regards
 Ralf