From Fedora Project Wiki

Current guideline:

  • MUST: Packages must NOT contain any .la libtool archives, these should be removed in the spec.

Proposal:

  • MUST: Packages must NOT contain any .la libtool archives in locations searchable by ld.so (see /etc/ld.so.conf, $LD_LIBRARY_PATH). In general, this includes only %{_libdir}. The intent is to avoid including .la files associated with shared libraries.