Dear Maintainers,

During the bump to dh13 a couple of years back the static libs were
removed from all *-dev packages[0].
This change has the unfortunate side-effect of making it impossible to
actually use the libraries in static builds (e.g. when building for
minimal container scenarios).

It would be great if we could either re-introduce them or at least add
a comment explaining the reasoning behind the removal (to avoid future
me bumping into this again ;))


Thanks!

[0] https://salsa.debian.org/debian/util-linux/-/commit/1e827a6811e2b22aacdd4b91b11aca9f103e5d12

Hi,

* Leo Antunes <costela@debian.org>:
except for very narrow within-Debian-use-cases.

I think if you do custom stuff for minimal containers etc, its best
if you bring your own libraries and do not rely on development
packages intended -for- Debian packages.

Chris

Hi,
$ apt-file search -lx '^/usr/lib/.*\.a$' | sort | uniq | wc -l
6849

That doesn't look very narrow 😅
Also, policy explicitly mentions it as "usually provided"[0], which -
granted - doesn't mean you *have* to do it, but does kinda endorse it.

Just because we (via policy) forbid linking statically within debian,
it shouldn't mean we have to unnecessarily alienate out users (in this
case myself 🙈) when they want to do it on their systems.
broadest sense. Our users rely on debian providing a usable gcc to
build stuff, just as they rely on us providing libs for them to link
against, dynamically or otherwise. AFAICT there's nothing particularly
debian-specific about this?

But don't get me wrong: if there's a technical reason I'm overlooking,
then the points above are irrelevant, of course.