On 09/16/2009 04:16 PM, Till Maas wrote:

Hiyas,

I just noticed that the packaging guidelines say the .la archives should not be included but the review guidelienes say that they must not included:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#StaticLibraries https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:ReviewGuidelines

I stumbled up this because the Merge Review of apr cannot be finished with clarification of this: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=225253

I believe it should be a MUST with exceptions. Review Guidelines are more succinct and therefore less prone to a slip up when being written up. Even then, there have been times when a Review Guideline uses the uppercase, bold '''MUST''' to show that it's a MUST but then used should in the sentence describing what needs to be done.

The only current exception is: """ Note that if you are updating a library in a stable release (not devel) and the package already contains *.la files, removing the *.la files should be treated as an API/ABI change """

That means that *.la should only be removed in devel or on new package review.

The apr case could be a second exception (based on the idea that the apr-1-config --link-libtool should work on fedora). However, looking at the source code to /usr/bin/apr-1-config, I don't think that the removal of the *.la causes apr-1-config to fail::

--link-libtool) # If the LA_FILE exists where we think it should be, use it. If we're # installed and the LA_FILE does not exist, assume to use -L/-l # (the LA_FILE may not have been installed). If we're building ourselves, # we'll assume that at some point the .la file be created. if test -f "$LA_FILE"; then flags="$flags $LA_FILE" elif test "$location" = "installed"; then ### avoid using -L if libdir is a "standard" location like /usr/lib # Since the user is specifying they are linking with libtool, we # *know* that -R will be recognized by libtool. flags="$flags -L$libdir -R$libdir -l${APR_LIBNAME}" else flags="$flags $LA_FILE" fi ;;

Is there a test case where removing the *.la causes a program to stop that uses apr-1-config --link-libtool to stop building? If not, then this is definitely not a valid basis for an exception.

-Toshio