[Xquartz-dev] Notes on OSX 10.5.5

[Paul Davis]

On Tue, 2008-09-16 at 11:24 -0700, Jeremy Huddleston wrote:

> That seems absurd to me, to me given the headache this is causing now,  
> but it made more sense back with Tiger's X11 which was based off of  
> XFree86 and had a much more stable SDK and didn't use autoconf/libtool  
> (hence no .las).

[ ... ]

>   The  
> best thing we can do is just remove the .la files from future Xcode  
> releases (which will make "fresh" systems work, but will leave  
> reference issues in existing macports/fink installs... which are  
> "broken" already).

My apologies if this is redundant info, but .la files are utterly
useless on any "modern" *nix system. They fill a hole on some systems
where the dynamic linker cannot do what a dynamic/runtime linker should.
The OS X, Unix and even the Windows ones are adequately capable, and .la
files serve absolutely no purpose on these platforms. They are also an
impediment to debugging and other issues. To be honest, I can't even
remember which systems needed .la files, but it mostly old SysV-derived
commercial unix systems IIRC. Nobody should be using them (or, frankly,
(g)libtool, although it does provide a useful veneer over the shared
library building process that really should have been replaced by
another tool IMHO. Certainly, there are many people using scons now
which has the same level of portability for major OS platforms and
without any .la nonsense).

--p