static libraries' policy

[Michael A. Peters]

On Sat, 2005-11-12 at 00:56 +0100, Christian.Iseli at licr.org wrote:
> mpeters at mac.com said:
> > They are extremely useful when compiling a piece of software that you intend
> > to run on a different distribution.
> 
> I'm not so convinced.  If that's really something you want to do: why not copy 
> the shared libs along with the application ?

Doesn't always work so well. The shared libraries have be put where
ldconfig can find them (and by default, it does not look
in /usr/local/lib) - and I personally have experienced problems with
different versions of the flac shared library installed once pre-binding
ran (it broke any application using the older flac library).

> 
> > If you want to separate them out into a -static package that requires the
> > -devel package, that's fine - but to just simply not include them will result
> > in some developers switching to a distribution that allows THEM to decide
> > whether or not to build software against a static library or not rather than
> > imposing on them how they are to compile software.
> 
> I'm not against having -static packages, but I'm not sure it's worth the 
> trouble either.
> 
> I'm not against concerned developers having an %ifdef build_static in their 
> spec files.  I just think it should be off by default.

I agree that anything packaged for Fedora {core,extras,livna,jpackage}
should absolutely use shared libraries whenever possible. You don't need
to remove static libraries though to make that be build policy.

Removing them only serves to make it more of a hassle for those who do
have a reason to link against a static library.

Removing .la files is understandable - they cause problems, and
pkgconfig is a better system that has been widely adopted. Static
libraries simply being present does not cause any problems though - any
software that can use either will likely have a configure switch to
choose, and almost always defaults to linking against the shared
library.

> 
> I'd rather users think of Fedora as secure, sleek, fast, with some tendancy to 
> the cutting edge...

And that can be accomplished without removing static libraries.
Any binary shipped by Fedora {core,extras,livna,jpackage} should link
against a shared library whenever that is possible.

> 
> pertusus at free.fr said:
> > I know some scientists and some sysadms (in labs, too ;-) that like to  be
> > able to do that. 
> 
> It means they are tweaking packages anyway, and so should have no trouble 
> getting the static libs they might need.

Which can easily be accomplished by using a distro that has not
arbitrarily decided it doesn't want tweakers to have static libraries
available from the operating systems repository.