Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: Installation of static libraries, USE=static-libs proposal

[Mart Raudsepp]

On Sun, 2008-07-20 at 15:40 +0400, Peter Volkov wrote:
> В Втр, 01/07/2008 в 05:05 +0300, Mart Raudsepp пишет:
> > Over a year or two ago, it was communicated that it supposedly a policy
> > that USE=static
>
> Well, I don't have web-reference at hand now, but there was a thread in
> gentoo-dev with the subject: "Say no to static libraries!". Summarizing
> some ideas from there:
>
> 1. Some packages will break if you build their deps with USE=static.
> This can be fixed when we start to use USE-deps in the tree.
>
> 2. We already have mechanism to make what you want. Just drop
> EXTRA_ECONF="--disable-static" into your make.conf and to workaround
> problem stated in point 1 use
>
> EXTRA_ECONF="${EXTRA_ECONF/--disable-static}"
>
> in /etc/portage/env/cat/pkg. (For those who interested  list of packages
> for which I have to filter --disable-static is in attachment).

I'm going to simply drop the remaining USE=static's where appropriate,
if upstreams choice is to disable static libraries, and we'll see even
later what to do about those that don't default to not building static
libraries. For now I stumbled on just gtk-engines.

That is, some GNOME packages make it their own business to override the
automake default of building both - they call AM_DISABLE_STATIC.
So for those I'll just drop any --{enable,disable}-static (as I notice)
and honor upstreams choice in not building static libraries. This also
means nothing uses or needs the static libraries because all GNOME
tinderboxes and jhbuild based development machines would scream in agony
if it broke anything.

> Well, I'm using EXTRA_ECONF for more then year now and I'd like to say
> that it's not perfect solution. Not all packages are autotools based and
> ignore --disable-static and now I have 103M of static libs on my
> desktop. So now I'm all for having static-libs USE flag. But please,
> don't do that on per-package base. Make an eclass for that. Think about
> not-autotools packages, and don't put it in the tree until we start
> using USE deps.

I know of absolutely no GNOME package that needs its static libraries
installed. Only exception is glib, but that is a lower level library,
not a GNOME one - there we explicitly enable it for syslog-ng possible
use primarily. And for glib I'm quite cool in enabling it always, as my
take on glib is that it's a standard C library that makes C actually
usable and powerful, just as libstdc++ makes C++ more powerful, and
should be universally available to all. Though an alternative would be
to install it in /lib, so that boot tools can use it and not need to
link statically - having syslog-ng in mind primarily.

> Thanks for reiterating this discussion. I wanted to return to it soon as
> seems that USE deps are really about to enter our life.

And now I'm reiterating it again the first time since 3 months.

> And BTW, seems that all gnome packages obey EXTRA_ECONF ;)

And probably G2CONF too, but we like to use that for ebuild use only -
we aren't sure we have G2CONF="${G2CONF} foo" everywhere, etc.


-- 
Mart Raudsepp
Gentoo Developer
Mail: leio@g.o
Weblog: http://planet.gentoo.org/developers/leio