* Simon McVittie <s...@debian.org> [200630 11:23]: > On Tue, 30 Jun 2020 at 10:51:39 +0200, Chris Hofstaedtler wrote: > > I'm not sure it was a good idea before. Is static linking something > > you actively want to support for glib? > > It has worked in the past, Policy says the static library "is usually > provided", and we occasionally get bug reports from people who want to > link random libraries statically, so I didn't feel comfortable with > unilaterally disabling it for no particular reason. The autopkgtest > is there partly because things we don't test usually don't work, and > partly because static linking to libmount regressed during GLib's move > from Autotools to Meson (the pkg-config metadata in GLib was wrong); > I added it to confirm that the regression fix had been effective. > > If I'm disabling the static library because dependencies no longer > support it, then I can redirect bug reporters to the dependency and > let them argue their case there if they want to (as with libdbus, which > can't be linked statically any more due to libsystemd).
Understood. Feel free to point people at libmount/src:util-linux. I'll see about removing libmount's static library in the -dev package. > People occasionally try to change Policy to say that static equivalents > of shared libraries are definitely optional, or even that they are > discouraged, but this never reaches consensus, because someone always > appears and says "well actually, I rely on Debian shipping shared libfoo > and libbar for armhf so that I can statically link them into a binary > for my embedded frobnicator device, which > (has glibc from 2005|doesn't have glibc|doesn't have space for glibc|...)". > The obvious counterpoint that solving this is not really Debian's job > is rarely effective. > > It is technically possible to link just the top of a dependency stack > statically (for example a GLib program with static GLib and libmount, > but dynamic libcryptsetup and glibc), but pkg-config doesn't make this > straightforward and in practice it requires hard-coding paths to static > libraries, so the autopkgtest in GLib doesn't attempt to exercise this. Thanks for the explanation! Best, Chris
