lafilefixer clarifications

transpetaflops · Apprentice Joined: 16 May 2005 Posts: 159

This has bothered me for some time now so I'll just have to ask. :roll:

After upgrading libpcre some time ago the elog output instructed me to install lafilefixer and run "lafilefixer --justfixit". Doing so, it found some files it updated without any errors.

Q1. What exactly is this utility and what are the implications of NOT running it as instructed?

Q2. Running this utility after a world update almost always seems to find a few more files to update. Is running this utility supposed to become a part of my normal world update routine from now on and couldn't the functionality be merged into emerge instead if this is the case?

Q3. Looking at the help, the "--justfixit" seems to limit the utility to a few pre-defined directories. Should I run it without any parameters at some point to scan through my complete filesystem?

Thanks in advance for your input.
/PP

Mike Hunt · Watchman Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 5287

Is it just my imagination, or does my whole system seem to be responding very much better/faster after running that?

mv · Watchman Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 6747

Mike Hunt · Watchman Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 5287

How does one find packages with the broken *.la files without lafilefixing them?

transpetaflops · Apprentice Joined: 16 May 2005 Posts: 159

I searched bugzilla and found only few reports that might be related to this so I guess it isn't a very big problem. One bug report suggested revdep-rebuild to take care of this instead. Some official best practices would be nice to have from the Gentoo team.

transpetaflops · Apprentice Joined: 16 May 2005 Posts: 159

Bumping this old thread because I wanted to direct your attention to a blog post by Diego:
http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2010/05/12/gentoo-failed-us-again

As I suspected, lafilefixer is referenced by more and more elog outputs these days and Diego recommends adding the following to /etc/portage/bashrc to automatically run lafilefixer after every merged package:

Voltago · Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2010 12:18 pm Post subject:

I'm wondering: Isn't it possible to get rid of the current static library format completely, and statically link .so files? Probably some changes would be necessary to the shared ELF object format, but is there a practical reason why two different formats are needed? (apart from legacy/compatibility reasons)

transpetaflops · Apprentice Joined: 16 May 2005 Posts: 159

Diego has fought long and hard with the other developers to drop la-files entirely. It's obviously a very infected issue so I'll stay out of it :-)

Voltago · Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2010 12:52 pm Post subject:

transpetaflops · Apprentice Joined: 16 May 2005 Posts: 159

I was just informed off forum about the following addition to Portage: http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/portage.git;a=commit;h=76118ef9b746ca3ba644504b6ddb13906bc2e2f0
This in combination with FEATURES="lafilefixer" (which is now default) seems to perform the same task as Diego's bashrc script. So, mv, your worst nightmare seems to have come true.

few · Guru Joined: 03 Mar 2008 Posts: 448

transpetaflops · Apprentice Joined: 16 May 2005 Posts: 159

Actually, my test from yesterday suggests it's the other way around. Below is a diff from emerging libxcb. The left column is from Diego's method, using lafilefixer, and clearly updates the la-files in the /tmp folder before installing. The right column is the output from using the Portage based python script and suggests the la-files are updated after being copied to their correct location in the fs. But the full path isn't shown there so I may be wrong. I don't know if this matters in any way though. The important thing is to let people know that they can uninstall lafilefixer and that they shouldn't have to run it manually ever again after doing an emerge -e world.