[Fedora-packaging] Re: paragraph on shipping static numerical libs

[Bill Nottingham]

Axel Thimm (Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net) said: 
> > All I'm saying is that we shouldn't continue to support this sort of
> > fundamentally-unsupportable setup ad nauseam - it's time to think about
> > how to solve this in a sane manner, rather than continuing to paper
> > over the problem. I don't see how, at a minium, moving the static
> > libraries to -static packages changes things - if, as you say, everyone
> > just chucks libraries manually in /usr/local, then how is this making
> > anything worse for them?
> 
> No problem at all with moving away static libs into their subpackage!
> But the thread went on to claim that static libs are not useful in
> general, and some people including myself just showed the typical use
> cases where it makes very much sense to have static libs around.

They aren't useful *in general*. It's supporting an outmoded, inefficient
mode of use (shuffling libraries and binaries around between machines and
OSes), and it's no different than various other outmoded, inefficient,
past UNIX-isms. We don't support every app parsing the password file
(or more) - we support authenticating via PAM. We don't support making
cdrecord setuid - we support fixing the kernel to DTRT. We don't
encourage logging in as root to do all tasks - we support consolehelper,
and moving to things like consolekit and separated helpers from their
UI frontends. We don't support creating specific groups to own devices -
we support pam_console and then ACLs added via ConsoleKit.

We don't support every single usage case that people want in Fedora -
it's about trying to solve the problems in the right ways that scale
going forward.

Bill