proposal to remove static libs from -devel packages for FC5

[Christopher Aillon]

On 07/22/2005 10:28 AM, 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?
>
Let's get rid of static libs where we can.  But there's no need to force 
people to move things around in packages.  Firefox, Mozilla, 
Thunderbird, etc. ABSOLUTELY CANNOT BUILD without the static lib of 
nspr.  Sure, that is a bug that is worth fixing, however, moving the 
static lib out of nspr-devel currently makes nspr-devel USELESS, so I 
see no point in doing this if people will need to install the -static 
package anyway to make use of the -devel package.

Veto on the proposed package naming scheme, but +1 on cleaning up static 
libs.