Hello all! I've seen that a lot of official ArchLinux packages don't also provide the static library variants (only the shared ones). (See at the end for a statistic, but summarized almost half of them are in this case.) These static variants of the libraries might be pointless for the "vanilla" distribution as most (all?) packages are dynamically linked. But as ArchLinux doesn't provide niche or obscure tools, I have to build them myself. (And by no mean I would like ArchLinux to have all the packages Debian has. I prefer ArchLinux to remain "slim".) And when I build them myself most of the time I can't make them statically link against the current installed libraries (as I have only shared ones). (I know the pros and cons of this. I don't want to debate static linking here.) But as the time goes and ArchLinux moves forward, old shared libraries just disappear, and my hand-built tools remain broken. (And of course I don't see they are broken when I break them, but instead just when I need them and I don't have time to fiddle around fixing them. And I've stumbled onto this multiple times until now, but it gradually gets annoying.) So my question is: what is the reason to not provide also the static library variants? Thanks, Ciprian. ~~~~ # number of packages which provide at least one `.so` library pacman -Ql | grep -E -e '/[^/]+\.so$' | grep -o -E -e '^[^ ]+' | sort -u | wc -l

...

378

# number of packages which provide at least one `.a` library pacman -Ql | grep -E -e '/[^/]+\.a$' | grep -o -E -e '^[^ ]+' | sort -u | wc -l

...

200