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

[Ville Skyttä]

On Sat, 2006-10-14 at 13:58 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 14, 2006 at 02:45:31PM +0300, Ville Skyttä wrote:
> > On Sat, 2006-10-14 at 13:29 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
> > > On Sat, Oct 14, 2006 at 02:20:19PM +0300, Ville Skyttä wrote:
> > >
> > > > ...and in many cases, end up unnecessarily bloating linkage of
> > > > binaries/libs in main packages too, making things like soname changes
> > > > even more painful than they already are...
> > > 
> > > I think the thread made clear that this is not the case.
> > 
> > If it did, I missed it.  Got any pointers to posts that support the
> > above conclusion to share?
> 
> How about this thread? No, honestly check the discussion especially
> Alexandre's posts who goes into the details of both libtool and
> non-libtool library internals.

Sorry, that's too much for me to dig into again now, so I'll exit the
thread with an observation: compare the output of these (attached also
for convenience):

rpm -qRp http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/4/i386/apt-0.5.15lorg3.2-7.fc4.i386.rpm
rpm -qRp http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/5/i386/apt-0.5.15lorg3.2-7.fc5.i386.rpm

What happened between FC4 and FC5 was that *.la were dropped from
rpm-devel and some other related -devel packages.  No changes to the apt
specfile, and the result is that apt in FE4 has 15+ more AFAICT useless
library dependencies than the same package in FE5, with no change in apt
functionality.  In addition to being unneeded, they're actually harmful:
if any of those libs would get a soname bump, it'd break apt's
dependencies and require a rebuild for no gain whatsoever.  (Note that
this is just an example, don't pay attention to the probabilities of
soname bumps in this particular case this particular time.)

Another thing is that the apt specfile in FE devel still has a lot of
BR's that were apparently sometime required because they were in
rpm-devel's *.la but were not pulled in by rpm-devel.  As the above
example shows, they were there only in order to cause unneeded bloat to
the resulting apt binaries, and now that they're most likely no longer
needed, they remain as bloat in the apt specfile.

Maybe removing *.la from rpm-devel and friends would have not been the
only possible solution to the apt runtime package dependency bloat
problem, dunno.  It seems to have worked very well, though.
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