icu 50 and how to identify dependents

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Feb 10, 2013, at 03:26, Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia <jeremyhu at apple.com> wrote:

> 
> On Feb 10, 2013, at 1:18 AM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Feb 10, 2013, at 03:17, Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia <jeremyhu at apple.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> On Feb 10, 2013, at 12:57 AM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>>>>> I think I want to explicitly add a port:icu dependency to all ports using pango to make these easier to find in the future.
>>>>> 
>>>>> No, please don't do that.  Only do that if the port actually links against icu.
>>>> 
>>>> Obviously I would only add the dependency if it actually links to icu. The problem is that now that pango uses harfbuzz and harfbuzz uses icu, now things that use pango use icu.
>>> 
>>> What makes you think that?  There's no reason to think that a port would use icu just because it's using pango.
>> 
>> The output of otool -L.
> 
> Yeah, that's the problem.  Look at the output of nm -m, and you'll see it's not actually using icu.  It's just linking against it because of glibtool's viral propagation of linkage.

What I mean is that I get messages that libraries a program or library links with cannot be found. In that sense at least, they are being "used". Therefore I revbump the affected port to rebuild it with the current version of the library and thus clear the error.

> 
>>> Why are we even shipping the .la files.  We should really just delete them from every destroot as they serve no useful purpose and always seem to just screw up builds.
>> 
>> I don't know what .la files are for so I'm not in a position to be able to assert that we should remove them.
> 
> .la files are "instructions" that glibtool leaves for itself on how it should link against a particular library.  They're sometimes useful on other platforms, but on OS X, they serve absolutely NO useful purpose.

Then I'm surprised MacPorts has gone 11 years already without removing them. Do other OS X package managers remove them?