why does xlibs-pic exist?

[Jack Howarth <howarth@bromo.msbb.uc.edu>]

    After a number of rants from Branden I rather confused now
as to why xlibs-pic exists at all. As best as I can tell through
the froth, Branden is saying that absolutely no static libs
should be linked into a shared lib. The conventional wisdom
on debian-powerpc seems to be that this should be extended a tad
to allow for programs that will need more work upstream. So that it
should be...

absolutely no static libs, that have not been built with -fPIC/-fpic,
will be linked into a shared lib.

The only statement I can find in the debian policy simply states...

All libraries must have a shared version in the lib* package and a static version in the lib*-dev package. The shared version must be compiled with -fPIC, and the static version must not be. In other words, each *.c file will need to be compiled twice.

This seems to be different from what I recall from only a few weeks ago
when it seemed to only say shared libs must be built with -fPIC and nothing
about static not being built that way. 
   So what is really correct? It would seem that xlibs-pic seems to only
encourage breaking the current new stricter policy on shared libs not   
containing static libs. I am very unclear as to what is the approved
fix then. If something like libsdl-image should not link any static lib
(even built with -fPIC) into its shared libs, then what use is xlibs-pic
at all? If we are going to enforce this darconian rule then xlibs-pic
should be depreciated out of xfree86 since it can't actually be used
without violating current debian policy. Nice Catch22.
                        Jack
ps I didn't realize some parts of England were only recently, and partially,
civilized (grin).