On 9 Mar 2000, Julian Assange wrote:

> Frederick Bruckman <fb@enteract.com> writes:
> 
> > The information in the .la file is supposedly a superset of all
> > possibly useful information. I'm sure the designers felt it was
> > harmless to install a small, text-only file.
> 
> Don't remove these files from installs! They are used by libtool
> in dynamic link / preload mode to resolve dependencies at run time.
> Most programs don't use libtool at run time, but some, e.g sawmill, 
> librep etc do.

I wasn't aware that any programs used libtool at runtime. This is one
more reason to proceed with the plan to replace pkglibtool (which
doesn't install the .la files) with libtool-1.3.4, fixing all the
PLISTS at the same time. I hope to have time to look into doing that
near the end of this month.