Bug#698398: lintian: Please error on static libraries named libfoo_s.a

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Package: lintian
Version: 2.5.12
Severity: wishlist

Hi!

I've noticed some static libraries wrongly named with an _s suffix.
This is problematic because users of those libraries cannot simply
switch a program from dynamic to static building by just changing a
compiler flag, they need to hunt down static libraries differently
named from their shared libraries counterparts.

The problem is that there's some cases which might appear as being
legitimate (probably builds with different compilation flags), and
if static libraries currently named as libfoo_s.a get renamed the
maintainer might want to provide a symlink to not unneedingly break
other packages or user builds.

So I think the check should look for static libraries in directories
searched by the linker, named 'lib(.*)_s\.a' and report an error, but
only if there's no other file named 'lib\1.a' for those two cases
mentioned above.

To see a list of the current cases:

  $ apt-file -x search 'lib.*_s\.a$'

Thanks,
Guillem