[arch-general] Many official packages don't also provide static libraries

[Ciprian Dorin, Craciun]

    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
~~~~