Re: removal of .la files from Debian and a possible solution to the libtool shared libs problem

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Russ Allbery wrote on Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 12:41:52AM CEST:
> Bob Friesenhahn writes:
> 
> >                          libfoo-ssl_fast.so
> >   myprog --> somelib -->     or
> >                          libfoo-ssl_slow.so

> This case is exceptionally rare.

It used to be a lot more common, and likely still is somewhat common, in
the HPC community.  You have several BLAS libraries to choose from,
several higher-level ones, too.  Of course, by now they aren't really
binary compatible any more at all, so it makes this less possible.

> In all the years that I've worked on
> free software and packaging of software for multiple different versions of
> UNIX, I've never wanted to do this, and I don't know of any case in the
> thousands of packages in Debian where this technique is used.

That was probably a conscious decision.

> Normally
> it's easier and more robust to just build two different versions of
> somelib, one for each of the alternative dependency libraries.  (See, for
> instance, how cURL is handled in Debian.)

So you end up with libfancyalgo-atlas-openmpi-devel and similar
packages.

Cheers,
Ralf