From: "Laurent Bercot" <ska-devel@skarnet.org>
To: maxice8 <thinkabit.ukim@gmail.com>, "Natanael Copa" <ncopa@alpinelinux.org>
Subject: Re: RFC on -static subpackages and being more static-linking friendly
Cc: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2021 09:32:19 +0000
Message-Id: <em7fe33a67-5fe4-498b-aac3-51e8520928f7@elzian>
In-Reply-To: <9d3541ec2a2890703a1cfdbda9d4d50136308699.camel@gmail.com>
References: <d0c4cab578c513f312390679680eb1cf31690a05.camel@gmail.com>
 <20210119212733.11bcc69b@ncopa-desktop.lan>
 <9d3541ec2a2890703a1cfdbda9d4d50136308699.camel@gmail.com>
Reply-To: "Laurent Bercot" <ska-devel@skarnet.org>
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>The split has helped me only once, while dealing with skarnet software
>suite, I don't think it is worth it to have a broken -static package
>that can't even be used ootb to link statically.

  I find it difficult to believe that my software has to be treated
differently from others. Could you please explain why and how -static
helped you with my software when it did not with other packages?

  I have no opinion on having -static packages or not, as long as
static libraries are made available in -dev if there is no -static.
It is important to allow developers and packagers to use static
libraries if they so choose.

  skarnet.org software uses static libraries by default, because
it's small enough that doing so actually ends up in less RAM usage.
In some cases (like utmps), the .a is actually *smaller* than the
.so, so using a shared library really doesn't make sense from a
resource usage standpoint.
  However, it can be trivially configured to use shared libraries
instead: --disable-allstatic. This flag is present in all my
APKBUILDs, to follow Alpine policy; and a policy change, or an
alternative build, is just a matter of commenting the flag.

  I don't understand the "broken -static package that can't even be
used ootb to link statically" part. Doesn't abuild create actually
functional -static packages?

--
  Laurent