Re: Manual page and library file

Preuße, Hilmar <[email protected]> Sat, 18 Jan 2025 22:52:19 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.tex.texinfo.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On 11.01.2025 12:05, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 11, 2025 at 10:31:25AM +0000, Gavin Smith wrote:

Hello,

>> What was the reason for removing the .la files in the first place?  Why
>> would you expect that you could remove files that a package installs with
>> nothing going wrong?  Is it usual to remove .la files in other contexts?
> 
> Hilmar may have a different answer, but it happens that in the past I was a
> Fedora packager and the policy to remove .la files, which can be seen here
> was already in place:
> https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines/#packaging-static-libraries
> 

For Debian we have a similar answer on [1].

<quote>
If the .la must be included, it should be included in the development 
(-dev) package, unless the library will be loaded by libtool’s libltdl 
library. If it is intended for use with libltdl, the .la files must go 
in the run-time library package.
</quote>

As I didn't know how the .so files were found / opened I tested if 
texi2any works w/o the .la files, noticed it did and asked here if the 
.la files are needed.

> I actually am convinced by this reasoning, which is why I think that we
> should try to make sure that .la files are not needed in Texinfo on
> platforms with good support for shared and dlopened libraries.
> 

As far as I understand this is now implemented and as of TeXinfo 7.x (x 
 > 2) the .la can be dropped, correct?

Many thanks for implementation!

Hilmar

[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-files.html#libraries

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