static libraries' policy

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Wed, 2005-11-09 at 08:44 -0600, Tom 'spot' Callaway wrote:
> Right now, there is not a "no static libs permitted" policy. The policy
> states that they should be avoided wherever possible. I could change
> this to a "no static libs unless you have a darned good reason, which
> you will need to document in the spec file" policy, since some apps are
> just too dumb to work with out them (unless the maintainer is willing to
> do what amounts to their own fork of the code).
> 
> The consensus that I'm hearing here is that a policy change would be
> welcomed for FC5+, does anyone dissent?

I dissent.

On Wed, 2005-11-09 at 17:45 +0300, Dmitry Butskoy wrote:
> Just repeat in one place:
> 
> Last summer a discussion about presence of static libraries in devel
> packages took place here:
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-maintainers/2005-July/msg00061.html
> 
> Then the decision has appeared: to strongly recommend to exclude
> static libraries from the devel packages, except for cases when it
> seems impossible for some reasons.
> 
I've just re-read that thread as well.  Here's my interpretation of
listed opinions:

Place static libraries in a -static subpackage:
Jen Petersen
Warren Togami
Ralf Corsepius
[1/2] Christian Iseli
[1/2] Ralf Ertzinger
(Probably) Ville Skyta (Mentioned informationally PLD and Mandriva have
-static and -static-devel resp.)
(Probably) Christopher Aillon (Had nspr specific comments, since
resolved)

Keep status quo
Daniel Velliard
[1/2] Christian Iseli
[1/2] Ralf Ertzinger
[1/2] Jeremy Katz

Remove completely
[1/2] Jeremy Katz (Because comps is too complex with -static)

([1/2] is where I interpretted the author to be in favor of either of
two alternatives.)

So my reading is that the decision was "We'd like to move them into
-static except that Jeremy has good points about the comps problem."

> It was specified in PackagingGuidelines , since 26.07.2005
> 
This was not a group decision, however.  This was done by Jens Petersen
relatively early in the conversation, before Daniel Velliard had weighed
in.  (The proposal had looked good until Daniel's points, however.)
Additionally, Jens original proposal was to remove static libraries as
much as possible and put them in -static when it wasn't possible.  After
problems were raised with this, the proposal seemed to shift to moving
static libraries into a -static subpackage.
> 
> This statistics as well as the discussion which has arisen after my
> initial message, testifies that people either did not hear about
> changes, or disagree with them.
> 
> This situation creates a precedent: there is a policy, but significant
> part of maintainers ignore it. Is it allowed (i.e. some kind of
> liberalism in Fedora) or is it bad (makes an anarchy)?
> 
We should remove the policy from the wiki until we hash out what we
really want.  The policy was entered into the wiki before the problems
with it were discussed and was written in a way that does not agree with
what the majority of those who were discussing on -maintainers were
advocating for.

-Toshio
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