Build fails on missing .la file when meson build of mate-desktop is installed

[lukefromdc]

Expected behaviour

Building against mate-desktop should work whether meson or autotools was used to build mate-desktop

Actual behaviour

With meson build of mate-desktop, configuration finishes but build errors out with
libtool: error: cannot find the library '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libmate-desktop-2.la' or unhandled argument '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libmate-desktop-2.la'

These .la files are not build with meson builds of anything, I've had this same problem MATE-wide in autotools builds with having to manually create .la files for GTK and GLIB and I do not know how to get around that

Steps to reproduce the behaviour

1:configure, build and install mate-desktop using meson
2: configure and attempt to build mate-control-center, which is autotools-only

MATE general version

1.27

Package version

git master as of 10-2-2023 nominal version 1.27.2

Linux Distribution

Debian Unstable

Link to bugreport of your Distribution (requirement)

None as this is a local build

[zhuyaliang]

@lukefromdc
How to configure the mate-control-center to reproduce this issue

[lukefromdc]

For mate-control-center, both
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu --sysconfdir=/etc --enable-shared=yes --enable-static=no --disable-schemas-compile
and
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu --sysconfdir=/etc --disable-schemas-compile

gave the build failures. The use of --disable-schemas-compile is to keep Checkinstall from picking up the file made by compiling schemas, which is generated in the post install script on package installation. Should have nothing to do with this.

[lukefromdc]

mate-desktop/mate-desktop#588
had no effect on this, not sure if it was intended to though

[lukefromdc]

Using
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu --sysconfdir=/etc --enable-shared=no --enable-static=yes --disable-schemas-compile
with this also didn't change the m-c-c build failures

[zhuyaliang]

I deleted libmate-desktop2.la and libmate-desktop 2.a as per your prompt, the issue cannot be reproduced

rm -rf /usr/lib64/libmate-desktop-2.a
rm -rf /usr/lib64/libmate-desktop-2.la
./autogen.sh  --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib64  --sysconfdir=/etc --enable-shared=no --enable-static=yes  --disable-schemas-compile
make
make install

[lukefromdc]

I may have something else going on locally responsible for this that I cannot find. For years I have had to manually add back hand-edited .la files to my glib and gtk3 builds to get autotools packages to build against them. Could be anything: my systems are quite customized and have NOT had a reinstall from a distro installer in 11 years, instead being re-imaged from an older filesystem backup image when I have to nuke from orbit.

If nobody else can duplicate this, I am OK with closing it and accepting that on my system these files will be permanently needed so long as anything has to be built with autotools

[raveit65]

Why using --enable-static=yes ?
I am following fedora package guide-lines and use --disable-statics.
And i remove *.la and *.a files at the end of package building if they are there.
All our packages working well with using dynamic libraries.

[lukefromdc]

Test purposes only, I normally enable only shared libraries. The test was to see if it could use the .a file from mate-desktop built with the latest meson PR and both enabled