At this point I expect most users to know that .la files are evil and they are often useless and that removing them can save you from having to do work when packages drop them, either upstream or in Gentoo. Unfortunately, most developers tend to be overly conservative and keep them around even when not needed even remotely.
One of the cases for which I have said times and times again that .la files should be removed is for plugins; the .la files for plugins are useful when you use libltdl to wrap around plugins loading (and not even needed), but are totally pointless when using the straight dlopen() call.
Unfortunately even when that’s the case, it’s hard for ebuild developers to feel confident that the files are unneeded, so here it comes a practical case study to identify when they are not used at all. First step is to decide which package to test; I’ll go with eog since I have noticed this before and I know they are not used.
The eog package installs some .la files:
% qlist eog | fgrep .la
/usr/lib64/eog/plugins/libreload.la
/usr/lib64/eog/plugins/libstatusbar-date.la
/usr/lib64/eog/plugins/libfullscreen.laNow we can see that the eog/plugins directory is where it’ll be looking for plugins, so we’ll start eog through strace and see if it tries to load any of that:
% strace -e open eog |& fgrep eog/plugins
open("/usr/lib64/eog/plugins/", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_DIRECTORY|O_CLOEXEC) = 14
open("/usr/lib64/eog/plugins/reload.eog-plugin", O_RDONLY) = 15
open("/usr/lib64/eog/plugins/statusbar-date.eog-plugin", O_RDONLY) = 15
open("/usr/lib64/eog/plugins/fullscreen.eog-plugin", O_RDONLY) = 15A quick look at the strace outout can let us see that it’s not loading the plugins at all; indeed in this case eog was started without any plugin enabled, and it only opened the .eog-plugin files, which are ini-like files describing the plugins and their information; I’ll write more about this in the future when I’ll resume my posts about plugins which I’ve been slacking off from for a while. So let’s enable some plugins (all three of them!) and try again.
% strace -e open eog |& fgrep eog/plugins
open("/usr/lib64/eog/plugins/", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_DIRECTORY|O_CLOEXEC) = 14
open("/usr/lib64/eog/plugins/reload.eog-plugin", O_RDONLY) = 15
open("/usr/lib64/eog/plugins/statusbar-date.eog-plugin", O_RDONLY) = 15
open("/usr/lib64/eog/plugins/fullscreen.eog-plugin", O_RDONLY) = 15
open("/usr/lib64/eog/plugins/libreload.so", O_RDONLY) = 16
open("/usr/lib64/eog/plugins/libstatusbar-date.so", O_RDONLY) = 16
open("/usr/lib64/eog/plugins/libfullscreen.so", O_RDONLY) = 16Now it looks better: it loads the .so directly; what does this mean? Simple: the package is most likely using dlopen() and not at all the libltdl wrapper. The .la files are not looked at, at all, so they can be removed without thinking twice.
With this method you can ensure that the .la files are just and only a side effect of using libtool rathre than something that is actually used by the software; to do that, though, you’ve got to make sure that the .so is at least loaded, otherwise you might not have loaded plugins at all (see the first output above).
Another common mistake is to consider the .la files needed or not depending on libltdl linking; this is not true in either case: software not linking to libltdl might make use of the .la files (kdelibs 3 for instance have their internal libltdl modified copy), and software using libltdl might not need .la files (PulseAudio for instance, that does not install .la files at all, in Gentoo).
This post brought to you by having so much work to do that just 2% of my actual mind was free!