[Pkg-gnu-smalltalk-devel] Bug#621170: Bug#621170: gnu-smalltalk: Getting rid of unneeded *.la / emptying dependency_libs

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 04/07/2011 12:17 PM, Thomas Girard wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Le 07/04/2011 09:10, Paolo Bonzini a écrit :
>> On 04/06/2011 09:28 PM, codehelp at debian.org wrote:
>>> gnu-smalltalk appears in this list as a source package because one or
>>> more of the binary packages (usually -dev packages) contain .la
>>> files.
>>
>> I believe this is just the libc.la which is not a "normal" .la file and
>> should not be removed.
>
> Indeed. This is the only .la file distributed in Debian GNU Smalltalk
> packages. How again is it used Paolo?

It provides a portable way to load libc and libm across different 
systems.  In GNU Smalltalk you can use

    DLD addLibrary: 'libncurses'

and (provided the -dev package is installed) it will automatically load 
the libncurses.so shared object.  Similarly it is desirable to allow

    DLD addLibrary: 'libc'

However, libc.so is not a symbolic link to libc.so.6 unlike all other 
.so files (and besides that, the library itself is not called 'libc' on 
all systems).  The simplest and most portable solution is to use a .la file.

Paolo

ps: yes, in the non-libc this introduces unwanted dependency on -dev 
packages.  This will be fixed in GNU Smalltalk 3.3