Pacman

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Tasklist

FS#22408 - add an option to exclude statically built libraries

Attached to Project: Pacman
Opened by Greg (dolby) - Wednesday, 12 January 2011, 06:49 GMT
Last edited by Allan McRae (Allan) - Wednesday, 12 January 2011, 09:50 GMT
Task Type Feature Request
Category makepkg
Status Closed
Assigned To No-one
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version 3.4.1
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

Since the vast majority of packages make use of dynamically linked libraries, the statically built ones are uneeded and a waste of hard drive space and quite possibly other conserns.
However most packages provide them cause the packagers dont bother disabling them during build.
I think it would be nice having an option like docs or zipman, which will be set to remove them by default and easily tuned to leave them in the package, eg. with !static.
This task depends upon

Closed by  Allan McRae (Allan)
Wednesday, 12 January 2011, 09:50 GMT
Reason for closing:  Won't implement
Additional comments about closing:  see comments
Comment by Greg (dolby) - Wednesday, 12 January 2011, 07:05 GMT
Seems there was a discussion back in February 2010 in arch-general about static libraries:
http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2010-February/010724.html
JGC says:
"When we switch to glibc-based initramfs, there shouldn't be any need for static compiled binaries anymore, ever."
Comment by Allan McRae (Allan) - Wednesday, 12 January 2011, 08:12 GMT
We already have the purge option. Adding *.a to PURGE_TARGETS would achieve this.
Comment by Greg (dolby) - Wednesday, 12 January 2011, 08:57 GMT
That indicates how much you like the static libs. :)

Is there any estimation how many of the built static libs are actually "needed" ?
Freetype and jpeg would be two according to the ML discussion above.
Right now in my core and extra abs tree !purge is only used by perl. It isnt even used for the /usr/share/info/dir file which i think was owned by glibc in the past.
PKGBUILDs specifically enabling static libs are db, lesstif, libjpeg and mhash which equals 4/2034 scripts while at the same time theres 302 .a files in my /usr/lib.

Overall, do you think such a feature is neeeded?
Comment by Allan McRae (Allan) - Wednesday, 12 January 2011, 09:49 GMT
!purge turns pruging off. So in Arch Linux the default value automatically removes the /usr/share/info/dir file (and is specifically what that feature was designed to remove).

Anyway, discussing whether static libraries are needed is a distribution specific question and so not directly a makepkg/pacman issue. If a distribution decides to remove static libraries as much as possible and they find the purge option not a good fit, then I would consider adding a specific option for the removal of static libraries (like we have for libtool files). Closing as "Won't Implement" until such time.

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