Re: foo-config scripts and removed .la files

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Mon, 21 May 2012, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> The question is what happens for static linking.  For example, in the
> FreeType case, I get the following:
>
>  > pkg-config --libs --static freetype2
>  -L/usr/local/lib -lfreetype -lz -lbz2
>
>  > pkg-config --libs freetype2
>  -L/usr/local/lib -lfreetype
>
> If I specify the .la flag for `libtool --mode=link', the above two
> case are properly covered...

Without the .la file, libtool needs to primarily trust the behavior of 
the compiler and linker.  Attempting to intuit what linking with -lfoo 
can and will do without a libfoo.la file is not reasonably possible. 
Due to this, libtool simply passes -lfoo to the compiler if libfoo.la 
is not found in the known linker search path.

While static linking is sometimes useful (and sometimes required), the 
trend is that libraries are always built as shared libraries and 
dynamic linking is used.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/