Bug#329762: Relaxation and documentation of the "-fPIC" constraint

[Loïc Minier <lool@dooz.org>]

        Hi,

On Fri, Sep 23, 2005, Bill Allombert wrote:
> They are certainly no good reason to _allow_ it. This breaks common
> expectation and is generally slower. I don't see any point to remove
> this requirement at this point.

 I think the policy is a place where we define things that must
 absolutely be avoided and can not ever be transgressed.  IMO, it should
 be as simple as possible and impose as little requirements as needed,
 the rest is style and best practices.

 For example the idea of running autoconf and automake during build is
 often frowned upon, but Policy doesn't forbid it, nor forbid it with
 exceptions.  The same goes for updating config.guess/config.sub.

 Even the fact that the -fPIC flag is explicitely listed is strange: the
 real goal is to avoid memory waste, by not duplicating ELF objects in
 RAM, and that's what debian-policy should prevent.  The Universal OS
 should not be too GCC, i386, or ELF specific.

 Hence, I think the developers-reference might be a better place to
 document best practices, or expected practices.

   Bye,

-- 
Loïc Minier <lool@dooz.org>