How to generate .la files (easy way)

me-macias · 12-31-2006, 06:16 AM

Hello,

First of all, I've built several packages from sources, so it is no stupid-mistake-question. I have all the devels packages, everything is (almost) beautiful.

I used opensuse 10.0 for a long time, and I was able to build, among others, k3b. However, in opensuse 10.2 I have problem with linking in k3b.

The linker (libtool) requires not only .so files as libraries but also a description -- .la file. And to my suprise those files are missing in many prepared (in the distro) packages. For example I can install expat (required by k3b) but only one file is missing -- the .la file. I can build expat by myself and when I compile it from the sources I get this .la file.

But the problem is I have no time to rebuilding every package in the system, especially to get only one tiny file.

So how can I easily create those .la files? For now, I just edited them manually, but this is nasty ;-)

Thanks in advance for more elegant solutions.

have a nice day, bye

jschiwal · 12-31-2006, 07:06 AM

A *.la is a libtool library and not a text file.
I don't have the source for k3b. Many programs use the autoconf system. I think that autolib is a tool used and not the main tool. Look at files with the .in suffix. Such as configure.in.

See section 13.4 of the libtool info document on the libtool script if that is what you are thinking of.

KDE projects are moving from using autoconf to cmake.

You can create the print worthy documentation from the .texi source for libtool by obtaining the source and running "texi2dvi libtool.texi" in the libtool-<version>/doc/ directory.
Or you can run "./configure" and then "make pdf". Many or most autoconf source packages will have a pdf or pdfdocs target.

me-macias · 01-01-2007, 02:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jschiwal

A *.la is a libtool library and not a text file.

It is a text file, example (libexpat.la):

Code:

# libexpat.la - a libtool library file
# Generated by ltmain.sh - GNU libtool 1.5.22 (1.1220.2.365 2005/12/18 22:14:06)
#
# Please DO NOT delete this file!
# It is necessary for linking the library.

# The name that we can dlopen(3).
dlname='libexpat.so.1'

# Names of this library.
library_names='libexpat.so.1.5.0 libexpat.so.1 libexpat.so'
...

I will look into libtool docs, thank you.