Re: Question regarding policy (11.2)
On Fri, Feb 07, 2003 at 08:16:29AM +1100, Brendan O'Dea wrote:
> 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:
>
...
> >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.
I don't think we should get rid of static libs completely...and I don't think
that all maintainers should rush to get rid of their static builds...
"should" would be what we need. I think that those who don't provide
static libs and a bug is filed against their package they should be then
required to provide them in some form or another...ie in the main -dev
package or in a -static-dev package. That way maintainers can't just
decide not to provide them no matter what users think. Example would be
that I want to not provide static libs of Qt/E 2...however if someone
out there actually needs them for some god awful reason I would do so. It's
not like I don't have disk space. It just a) sucks uploading/downloading
crap over my dial up modem and b) seems a big waste to me. :)
Ivan
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