Re: Question regarding policy (11.2)
On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 07:56:48PM +0000, James Troup wrote:
>Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org> writes:
>
>> However disks are cheap enough that it seems reasonable to ask
>> people doing development to go buy a big disk.
>
>It's not about disks so much as bandwidth. Disk may be cheap, but
>bandwidth isn't, at lesast not universally. I've also no idea who
>would want or need static libraries in this day and age, but maybe I'm
>missing something obvious.
As a rough estimate of the actual size taken up by the static libraries,
here's a random sample from my cache, giving the size in blocks of the
static lib, the total installed size and percentage:
libapt-pkg-dev[0] 0 312 (0.0%)
libbz2-dev 71 88 (81.6%)
libc6-dev 3913 13264 (29.5%)
libdb3-dev 1242 1360 (91.3%)
libdb4.0-dev 1018 1164 (87.5%)
libgdbmg1-dev 50 172 (29.1%)
libglib1.2-dev 300 620 (48.5%)
libjpeg62-dev 173 440 (39.4%)
libncurses5-dev 859 5296 (16.2%)
libperl-dev 1465 1500 (97.7%)
libpng2-dev 241 636 (38.0%)
libpopt-dev 32 132 (24.9%)
libreadline4-dev 350 596 (58.8%)
libssl-dev 2121 4940 (42.9%)
libstdc++2.10-dev 450 1988 (22.6%)
libstdc++5-dev 1718 4212 (40.8%)
libtiff3g-dev 359 1256 (28.6%)
libttf-dev 231 992 (23.3%)
libxaw7-dev 502 1108 (45.4%)
xlibs-dev 3882 10284 (37.8%)
zlib1g-dev 69 380 (18.4%)
19056 50740 (37.6%)
>From that sample, it would seem that static libraries make up less than
half of the -dev package in most cases.
While I've not generally required static libraries myself, there are
some cases where then can be desirable. Things like libc and ncurses at
least can certainly be useful for building statically linked rescue
tools--bash for example[1].
I can't on the other hand conceive of a reason to statically link a
Gnome program with the ten umptillion libraries that it requires.
Note however that while I may not have a requirement, I can't second
guess the needs of some user who may.
Downgrading 11.2 to "should" rather than "must" is probably a reasonable
change.
--bod
[0] Nice data point Jason.
[1] Debian Trivial Pursuit players out there just itching to scream
"apt-get install sash!" at this point may save their collective
breath.
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