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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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
