Looks like the resolution on bug #386665 is outdated. I've just tested libgphoto2 with no .la files and it seems to work. More specifically: 1. gphotofs was able to access ptp2 camera, 2. 'gphoto2 --debug -l' seemed to load all plugins. However, I don't know if dropping the .la files doesn't break portability to other systems, and I don't know if ltdl doesn't have some kind of cache that made it working for me.
I have seen Arch is still preserving them to get plugins loaded... but opensuse dropped them at 2.5.0 bump due them not being really needed :/ I would CC arch teams for keywords not in linux world to test
+*libgphoto2-2.5.7 (26 Jan 2015) + + 26 Jan 2015; Pacho Ramos <pacho@gentoo.org> +libgphoto2-2.5.7.ebuild, + -files/libgphoto2-2.4.7-respect-bonjour.patch, -libgphoto2-2.5.3.1.ebuild, + -libgphoto2-2.5.4-r2.ebuild, -libgphoto2-2.5.4.ebuild: + Version bump, drop .la files (upstream confirmed they are not needed: + https://sourceforge.net/p/gphoto/bugs/1004/ ), drop old. +
