Distributing .la files in devel packages for Windows?

[Tor Lillqvist]

What is the recommendation on distributing .la files in the Windows
devel package of some library? Personally I never do it in the
software I build and distribute for Win32 (and nobody has complained),
but now I have come across one devel package by another guy that does
include .la files in addition to static and import libraries. The .la
files contain pathnames totally local to his build machine. Surely
this doesn't make sense? It causes trouble at least for me when I then
build some other software that uses the library in question, and if I
just remove the .la files from his package, the trouble goes away.

The library in question also comes with a .pc file, which should take
care of the dependencies, so there is no need for a .la file to tell
the depencencies (when using the static archive of the library).
(pkg-config on Windows takes care of making .pc files freely
installable in any location without having to edit the prefix in the
.pc file.)

--tml