Am Sat, 02 Mar 2013 19:29:13 +1000 schrieb Allan McRae :

Just add *.a to PURGE_TARGETS in makepkg.conf rather than manually removing them. Anyone who needs them can disable that.

(I will keep them in glibc/gcc/binutils...)

Allan

Nice solution. We should add *.a to the default PURGE_TARGETS in the next pacman release. Static libs will die out then pretty quick. Maybe after some time a ToDo list could clean the older packages then. -Andy

as long as there is a simple way to turn off purging static libs, thiz sounds good Note that haskell also uses static libs

[2013-03-02 15:17:02 +0100] Jelle van der Waa:

Can't we add a rule to namcap, which warns packagers about static libs? Then the packager can decide whether they should included or removed.

Most packagers would not notice or care enough to remove static libs from the many packages where they are a complete waste of resources. In contrast, adding *.a to PURGE_TARGETS will definitely solve that problem in the long term without requiring anything from packagers - only those specific packages relying on static libs will need to add '!purge' to their options array. This seems the best solution to me. -- Gaetan

Le 2013-03-02 05:14, Andreas Radke a écrit :

Am Sat, 02 Mar 2013 19:29:13 +1000 schrieb Allan McRae :

...

Just add *.a to PURGE_TARGETS in makepkg.conf rather than manually removing them. Anyone who needs them can disable that.

(I will keep them in glibc/gcc/binutils...)

Allan

Nice solution. We should add *.a to the default PURGE_TARGETS in the next pacman release. Static libs will die out then pretty quick.

Maybe after some time a ToDo list could clean the older packages then.

-Andy

I agree to remove unneeded static libraries. However, we need to take care because the default building system of some packages, eg suitesparse, only provide static libs. I suggest to send patches/bug reports upstream for these packages. For suitesparse, I sent a patch upstream a few months ago. Cheers, Stéphane

On Sat, Mar 2, 2013 at 7:04 PM, Sébastien Luttringer wrote:

On Sat, Mar 2, 2013 at 10:16 AM, Andreas Radke wrote:

...

Our packages in our repos by default don't need static libraries (random .a files all around). I think they are a waste of disc space and abuse bandwidth when uploading/mirroring packages. Most users will never need them.

I suggest to drop all static libs by creating a ToDo list and install a rule to not ship static libraries anymore, maybe with some exceptions. Whenever users require static libs we should point to abs.

Could you tell me if removing all statics libs will avoid us to easily build static binaries using those binaries?

After private talk with Andy, I understood we loose the ability of building static binaries with this move. Not a big deal for me. Just everyone knows. -- Sébastien "Seblu" Luttringer https://www.seblu.net GPG: 0x2072D77A