proposal to remove static libs from -devel packages for FC5

[Jens Petersen]

Daniel Veillard wrote:
>   I dislike that. Any non-LSB lib should have static libs available one way
> or another from the distro otherwise we just make the distro unsuitable for
> ISV development (from an LSB POV).

Ok, fair point.  Except for some of the gnome libs perhaps as was pointed out
earlier.

>   1/ breaks all the documentation and user expectations

I don't see this, since most users don't need static libs at all anyway.

>   2/ forces Fedora Core 5 spec to be different from other distro specs

Perhaps we can encourage other distros to follow suite?

>      then user should also install libxml2-static and it must also be in the same rpm
>      transaction as the main, devel and python packages otherwise this
>      may just fail.

Why would libxml2-static have to be installed in the same rpm transaction?

>  Now multiply by the number of library we ship, to me you annoy the user
> and the maintainers.

Maintainers perhaps, but it seems most users don't need static libs at all.

>   I really disagree with this myself.

Ok, but what about all the wasted bandwidth of users who are forced to download
static libs as part of -devel packages every time they update that they never
ever use?

Thanks for your comments,

Jens