static libraries' policy

[Ville Skyttä]

On Mon, 2005-11-14 at 07:41 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

> Ville
> mentioned that Mandriva and PLD distribute -static packages; do they do
> this for every library or have they evolved some policy to decide when
> -static is necessary?

I don't know.  But I tend to think that splitting the current -devel
packages to -devel and -static(-devel) doesn't really add much value;
the only thing off the top of my head being somewhat smaller devel/build
system install sizes for the majority of cases (ie. ones that use shared
libs only).  Am I missing something else?

Dropping static libs would have the already mentioned pros and cons, but
one more pro would be that it'd be easier to clean up various *-config
scripts and pkgconfig files of stuff that's only needed for static
linking but in practice is applied to shared too, leading to unnecessary
dependency bloat.  (AFAIK "ld --as-needed" isn't ready for prime time
yet (if ever?) to be the default.)