On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 6:38 PM, Gaetan Bisson wrote:

[2013-10-25 10:10:55 +0200] Carsten Mattner:

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Is there still a way to statically link libraries where the recent change to remove the .a files has been completed?

To build something statically you will just need to rebuild its dependencies statically too. Note that static libraries have never really been supported and were never shipped by most packages. The rebuilds we are doing are enforcing consistency rather than a new policy.

So that means Arch Linux has always been unique in that regard and it has been by lucky accidence static linking of libs installed by pacman worked? If that's the case this should be documented the same way other distros (suckless) do not support dynamic linking of the provided packages don't you think?

On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 10:12 AM, Gaetan Bisson wrote:

[2013-10-26 09:39:21 +0200] Carsten Mattner:

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So that means Arch Linux has always been unique in that regard and it has been by lucky accidence static linking of libs installed by pacman worked?

Yes.

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If that's the case this should be documented the same way other distros (suckless) do not support dynamic linking of the provided packages don't you think?

It's obvious that static libs aren't supported by distros that ship none, don't you think?

Yes but this was news to me and is unusual. So this should be stated clearly on archlinux.org or at least the wikipedia article.

On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 2:17 AM, Timothée Ravier wrote:

On 26/10/2013 22:22, Carsten Mattner wrote:

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Yes but this was news to me and is unusual. So this should be stated clearly on archlinux.org or at least the wikipedia article.

Please edit/update the pages you deem fit for this information in the Arch Wiki and/or Wikipedia.

Checked Debian and Fedora and was surprised that both don't bundle .a files. Must be not that unusual and I was wrong.

On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 1:01 AM, Allan McRae wrote:

On 29/10/13 08:43, Carsten Mattner wrote:

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On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 2:17 AM, Timothée Ravier wrote:

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On 26/10/2013 22:22, Carsten Mattner wrote:

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Yes but this was news to me and is unusual. So this should be stated clearly on archlinux.org or at least the wikipedia article.

Please edit/update the pages you deem fit for this information in the Arch Wiki and/or Wikipedia.

Checked Debian and Fedora and was surprised that both don't bundle .a files. Must be not that unusual and I was wrong.

Not quite correct. Fedora and Debian do provide static libs in their -devel packages along with headers.

That makes sense and I had been wondering how I used to link statically on Debian. So this is a noteworthy differentiating feature after all then. Suggestions where in the wikipedia article to add the "disclaimer"?