static libraries' policy

Dmitry Butskoy buc at odusz.so-cdu.ru
Wed Nov 9 14:45:25 UTC 2005


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.
It was specified in PackagingGuidelines 
<http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingGuidelines#head-e3f33b737a91aa22385d1cb155bb8d611558ae22> 
, since 26.07.2005

After that, the majority of new packages should appear without static 
libraries. Either contributor himself or reviewer should block attempts 
to leave *.a files in the devel packages. Developers of already added 
packages should gradually update them, having excluded static libs.

But actually all is differently. There are many packages since the 
summer, which have been included in FE with preserved static libraries. 
Many packages included earlier have undergone changes recently (i.e. 
maintainer have changed something in spec file), however static 
libraries have not been removed.

The statistics are here:
- 235 packages in FE have "devel" subpackage
- 149 (63%) still included static libs,
from them 72 (48%, or 31% against all) was modified somehow since the 
policy change, but static libs are still present.

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)?


Dmitry Butskoy

P.S.
Certainly there are some packages which should have static libs (for 
example "glibc" as basic thing, "mozilla-nspr" as can be linked only 
statically, etc). But these are more exception than normal, and the 
number of such packages is about one ten per whole Fedora (IMHO).

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