nALFS fails to build w/o .la objects

[winkie@…]

Let me begin by saying that I remove all *.la objects on my system, a very non-standard thing to do. Everything I use compiles & works fine like this, except nALFS. It fails to build because /usr/lib/lib{curl,xml2}.la are missing.

Replacing those paths in the Makefile with -l{curl,xml2} fixes it, and the

resulting binary works fine. Something is unnecessarily (IMHO) hardcoding the use of libtool objects from the host.

[jamie@…]

Offending lines seem to be

line 120: XML2_LIB=${XML2_CONFIG} --libs | sed -e 's/^-L\(.*\) -lxml2.*$/\1/'/libxml2.la

line 152: CURL_LIB=${CURL_CONFIG} --libs | sed -e 's/^-L\(.*\) -lcurl.*$/\1/'/libcurl.la

of bootstrap.configure.

[kpfleming@…]

I respectfully disagree that this is a valid issue. When packages install their libraries using libtool, and other libtool-using packages depend on those libraries, it makes sense to use the .la files. There are lots of situations where people can install their packages in non-standard ways and the presence of the .la files will actually _allow_ nALFS to properly link and operate against those libraries. Changing the Makefile to not use the .la files will eliminate this option.

In my mind, this is no different than removing all the .pc files put in by packages that use pkg-config; if you do that, you'll never be able to build large parts of GNOME/KDE, and the maintainers of those packages certainly won't accomodate that situation. We shouldn't either.

[jamie@…]

As there has only been one report of a problem with this and its a non-standard anyway I'm going to go with Kevins recommendations and close this with WONTFIX.