On Wed, Jun 02, 2004 at 07:31:09AM -0400, Stephen Frost wrote: > * Steve Langasek (vorlon@debian.org) wrote: > > On Tue, Jun 01, 2004 at 07:55:36PM -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote: > > > What about static linking? (the "other" role of -dev packages) > > If there are consumer applications that use libtool, and the library > > they're statically linking against provides a .la file, it makes sense > > for there to be dependency relationships between the -dev packages. In > > practice, since almost nothing in Debian gets linked statically, I'm not > > sure there's much ground for requiring a Depends: for this case alone. > I'm not inclined to agree with even this. libtool generating .la files > isn't a justification to add a Depends any more than me adding a .sfrost > file to my packages would be. It's an informational file as far as I'm > concerned, it certainly isn't necessary. The .la files exist to remove the burden from application maintainers to manually track the dependencies of the static libs they need. This is a worthwhile goal, and it makes sense for users to want this to be reflected at the Debian package level as well; it just doesn't make sense to make things more convenient for users of static libs at the expense of much more common use cases. Perhaps a Suggests: would be appropriate here. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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