Anyone have an efficient method of removing .la files?

dopey · Apprentice Joined: 10 Feb 2003 Posts: 235

I've noticed that more often than not, an unmerge of a package doesn't clean up the .la files. In the past I sorta paid attention to the unmerge, and removed any modified files that made sense to manually, but since it's a manual method, it's not really scalable, and I've missed files here and there.

The new revdep-rebuild in gentoolkit-2.2 seems to look for libtool files that have incorrect library dependencies. Problem is, it's repeatedly finding .la files now that don't exist in a package (because I've unmerged the package). I've just been deleting these manually after running a couple of runs of revdep-rebuild.

The other solution I have is a script that finds all .la files and individually checks if they are owned by a package. None of these methods are really very scalable.

Any better ideas?

msalerno · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 6:06 pm Post subject:

Here you go. With a little more time, you could automatically delete the la files that don't belong to anything.

find / -name *.la -printf %p"\t" -exec equery -qe belongs {} \;

Any .la file that does not belong to anything will not have a package printed next to it.

dopey · Apprentice Joined: 10 Feb 2003 Posts: 235

Right, but my point is, that's just horribly ugly, since aren't you basically running an equery for every *.la file found?

Of course, I'm just hoping there's a better solution, but in reality, there probably isn't one.

msalerno · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 9:14 pm Post subject:

Without creating a list of .la files in the installed pacakages, it will "be ugly".

Here's an alternative to the equery command.

find / -name *.la -printf %p"\t" -exec grep {} /var/db/pkg/*/*/CONTENTS \;

msalerno · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 9:44 pm Post subject:

Or, like I posted above, just create a list of all .la files in all installed packages, then run search against that.

The following perl one liner might not be pretty, but it works!

perl -lane '$pk=(join"/",(split"/", $ARGV)[-3,-2]); print "$pk $F[1]" if $F[1] =~ /\.la$/' /var/db/pkg/*/*/CONTENTS > all-la.txt

Then just:

find / -name *.la -printf %p"\t" -exec grep -c {} all-la.txt \;

dopey · Apprentice Joined: 10 Feb 2003 Posts: 235

Let me ask my question in a slightly different way

Pardon my ignorance regarding libtool, but would it be safe to say, if a libtool (.la) file exists, and no .so file exists for the same basename, that it's an invalid file right?

I guess I was thinking along that lines rather than reading up files, and then searching through a "database" to see if the file belongs to something.

Gergan Penkov · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 10:33 pm Post subject:

well look here https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90744#c8
although not what you really want, depending on what you use (gnome) it could be a safe operation to remove all of the la-s, as they are not used for anything usefull, my system is totally la-free for a three months or so and is working just fine, aside from the need to patch 3-4 packages.
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msalerno · Posted: Tue Jun 13, 2006 11:31 am Post subject:

I had a very very slow day at work...

This will create a hash of all of the .la files from the installed packages, search the filesystem, look for the package that the .la file belongs to and print any orphans.

dopey · Apprentice Joined: 10 Feb 2003 Posts: 235

Thanks, glad someone else has time at work to do this

Makes perfect sense. And alot more scalable than equerying every single .la file.