proposal to remove static libs from -devel packages for FC5

[Jens Petersen <petersen redhat com>]

This has been in my mind for a while, but now I finally post it here:

I believe we're still shipping many static libs in -devel not least
in Core, which make our -devel packages rather heavy.  I think the
vast majority of them are not needed or used really at all.
So they should just be removed.  Some packages may have a --disable-static
configure option for example to help with this, or they can just be
deleted easily by hand in the %install section.

For the cases where it is still desirable or necessary to ship static libs,
I would suggest to move them from -devel into a separate -static
subpackage so that people who don't need them don't have to suffer
downloading and installing them.

Does this sound reasonable?  Make any sense? :)
Comments and discussion welcome.  What would be the best way to proceed?
Filing bugs against every package that ships static libs?

Jens