Re: removal of .la files from Debian and a possible solution to the libtool shared libs problem

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 25 Aug 2009, Russ Allbery wrote:
> I know what the difference is.  My point is that adding an explicit
> dependency on a shared library whose ABI you do not use directly simply
> doesn't scale when maintaining a distribution the size of Debian.  You
> have to rely on the dynamic linker to resolve transitive dependencies.  I
> mention the dynamic linker because one of the reasons why libtool has this
> feature is for platforms where the dynamic linker *cannot* resolve
> transitive dependencies and needs the binary to be linked against all
> shared libraries, including ones only used indirectly.

How would you like to deal with the case where a library has multiple 
usable dependencies, which satisify identical purposes, but via 
different possible libraries?

                         libfoo-ssl_fast.so
  myprog --> somelib -->     or
                         libfoo-ssl_slow.so

Note that in this case myprog depends on somelib and so that is an 
explicit dependency.  However somelib needs some symbols from a 
library that the user selects at link time.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/