proposal to remove static libs from -devel packages for FC5

[Warren Togami]

Jens Petersen wrote:
> This has been in my mind for a while, but now I finally post it here:
> 
> I believe we're still shipping many static libs in -devel not least
> in Core, which make our -devel packages rather heavy.  I think the
> vast majority of them are not needed or used really at all.
> So they should just be removed.  Some packages may have a --disable-static
> configure option for example to help with this, or they can just be
> deleted easily by hand in the %install section.
> 
> For the cases where it is still desirable or necessary to ship static libs,
> I would suggest to move them from -devel into a separate -static
> subpackage so that people who don't need them don't have to suffer
> downloading and installing them.
> 
> Does this sound reasonable?  Make any sense? :)
> Comments and discussion welcome.  What would be the best way to proceed?
> Filing bugs against every package that ships static libs?
> 

Furthermore would anyone be averse to the idea of making it policy to 
explicitly note in spec files when static libs are used in such a way 
that it is easy to do an automated search?  Something simple like:

# Static Lib: libfoo

It is otherwise a huge PITA when a security hole is discovered and we 
need to sweep the entire distro for static copies, like the huge zlib 
mess we had a while back.

The majority of cases though we want to try to eliminate use of static 
copies...

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com