static libraries' policy

[Ville Skyttä]

On Thu, 2005-11-10 at 12:45 -0500, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:

> You can't operate automagically here, since sometimes static libs are,
> for some reason or another, required for program execution during
> run-time. E.g. KDE programs, when loading plugins, will always look
> for .la files, and ignore .so files, unless specifically instructed to
> load the .so extension (and last time I tried this, it didn't work).
> You can only safely discard the static libs that are not required for
> program operation, and it's impossible to make such decisions
> automatically.

But *.la (libtool archive) != *.a (static library).  FWIW, I have doubts
that anything would actually require static libraries (*.a) at runtime,
assuming runtime doesn't include "compiling stuff".