Nuking the libtool archives? How could be done?

Gergan Penkov

So recently I have very irritating experience with these .la files and I googled around, it seems that all major distributions are slaying them away for good.
I'll relate the problems here, in order not to look like I'm flaming or sth like this:)
The first problem was after removing the howl use flag, rebuilding with emerge -D --newuse world and all seemed to be fine, till running revdep-rebuild - probably all the gnome libraries were broken, although they are not using directly howl. Of course revdep-rebuild could not determine the correct order in this case and I had to emerge them with the trial and fail method

Why is this happening, because the .la files of the libraries, which really depend on howl are including it as dependancy. In turn rebuilding libraries, which depend on these libraries, is linking them against howl and so on till all are contaminated.
The second is with gnome-panel, it depends on e-d-s, which in turn depends on mozilla/mozilla-firefox, so in this way the clock-applet is linking against some mozilla-libraries, which the developers state have nothing to do with the clock-applet (and I belive in this) http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=314612
So in this way the gnome is bloated, because every library is linking to some libraries, which it does not use directly (yes I know that libraries are loaded only one time, but there are extra time to see if this is the same library and so on).
So my questions are: are there any ideas to remove these files (at least cleaning gnome, because they are used in kde) and is there someone who has accomplished it successfully?
_________________
"I knew when an angel whispered into my ear,
You gotta get him away, yeah
Hey little bitch!
Be glad you finally walked away or you may have not lived another day."
Godsmack

Gentree · Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2005 5:36 pm Post subject:

Well , deafening silence on that one!

Do you know what other distros are doing to get rid of this la-madness?

What acturally creates and manages these files? Compiler options , make files?

There must be some way to trim off the fat.

_________________
Linux, because I'd rather own a free OS than steal one that's not worth paying for.
Gentoo because I'm a masochist
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Gergan Penkov · Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2005 6:24 pm Post subject:

well I could not find much information on this but here it is from arch-linux http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Libtool_slaying
now simply deleting the files is done in some fedora .spec-build instructions, but this is really different for gentoo, as it is too much work to be done on each package.
I could not find options for the autotools, which could make this automagically.
On the other hand simply deleting the .la files works, untill the package in question is rebuilt

So I really don't know for now any clean solution.
_________________
"I knew when an angel whispered into my ear,
You gotta get him away, yeah
Hey little bitch!
Be glad you finally walked away or you may have not lived another day."
Godsmack