[csw-maintainers] static libraries lib*.a in our packages

[Philip Brown]

On Wed, Apr 08, 2009 at 07:47:32PM +0200, Peter FELECAN wrote:
> I cannot recollect precisely if we already had this discussion. Phil and
> me, we had an exchange on this subject and I would like to have the
> opinion of the other fellow maintainers as our point of view are not
> totally convergent.
> 
> The questions are:
> 
> 1. Is a good practice for CSW packages to contain library archives of
>    the form lib*.a when we deliver dynamic libraries lib*.so ?
> 
> 2. What's the potential usage for such libraries?


To save some back-and-forth on the mailing list, here's a bit of history
for folks who were not around for the original discussions 4(?) years ago
:)

The perspective was that people very rarely ever use static libraries.
nowadays, pretty much every library is a dynamic library.
This helps both for memory sharing, and for ease of updates.
(you only have to update the lib package, not have to recompile
everything).

Occasionally, there may be benefits to making a static library for some
software available for optional use. However, when and if the maintainer
decides there is a benefit to providing a static lib, it is best to do so
in a "devel" subpackage (unless the library is relatively small).

that way, when a library package gets pulled in, solely as a result of
some other package having a dependancy on "libfoo.so", the user does not
needlessly download "libfoo.a" as well.

This is particularly important in the case of some packages, such as
opensp, where the static library size is *4 megabytes*.


so.... that's the background. 
Other folks, please add your thoughts to this :-)