Patches to stop libtool droppings (#4898)

[Matt Turner]

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 10:01 PM, Gaetan Nadon <memsize at videotron.ca> wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-11-19 at 14:58 -0800, Jesse Adkins wrote:
>
> Following this is a whopping 66 patches. These patches cover every driver
> listed under cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/ (So wacom and some other got
> skipped). I skipped the drivers where configure was set to fail.
>
> Can you elaborate, perhaps in the bug report, the motivation for removing
> this file?
> All I read is that we don't want it or it's no needed. It must be important
> enough for some
> to justify adding this makefile hook. It is important to make sure that, in
> a few months from now,
> someone does not show up and say that it is needed for some reasons.

There are some pretty good blog posts that explain .la files here:
http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2008/04/14/what-about-those-la-files
http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2008/07/02/again-about-la-files-or-why-should-they-be-killed-off-sooner-rather-than-later
http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2009/04/18/some-details-about-our-old-friends-the-la-files

In essence, .la files are needed for specifying library dependencies
for static libraries, but are unneeded for dynamic libraries.

Matt