Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> writes:
Hello Russ,
* Russ Allbery wrote on Fri, Nov 07, 2008 at 01:20:28AM CET:
The most frequent problem caused by *.la files is that they add a pile
of unnecessary dependencies to shared libraries, which further
entangles package dependencies and makes upgrades unnecessarily hard.
(This is the long-standing problem of including all dependencies
required for static libraries, which aren't needed for shared libraries
on systems that handle transitive dependency closures when loading
shared libraries.)
Which is nicely solved with --as-needed, as long as you don't need to
stick in extra, seemingly-unneeded library dependencies that only become
useful for dlopen'ed modules.
Debian's experience to date is that --as-needed is buggy and breaks a lot
of software, and overall is not a particularly stable solution. Removing
*.la files so that the unneeded shared libraries aren't linked in the
first place works considerably better at the moment.