Bug#337025: libgtksourceview-dev does not ship .a, static linking of libgtksourceview is not possible

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Wed, Nov 02, 2005 at 11:53:20AM +0100, Loic Minier wrote:
>  I just checked policy, and I think nothing requires the presence of a
>  static version of the library.

Indeed. I only said the it assumes as a common feature the presence of
the .a since it explicitely mention libraries without the .so but not
libraries without the .a.

>  - experience proved that some static libraries don't work at all, and
>    noone stepped up to repair them due to the complexity of the build
>    process (I think the discussion started due to the size of
>    libgtk2.0-dev)
>  - static libraries eat a lot of space (the current installed size of
>    libgtksourceview-dev is 164k, and would bump by 672k)

I'm aware of that drawbacks and I usually don't use static libraries.
However, I'm in the need to distribute to end users an application which
has a lot of build-time dependencies (esotic programming language and a
lot of libraries along with their C-bindings). In such a scenario, being
able to distribute, side by side with the source code, a binary
executable with some libraries statically linked in is a great benefit.

>  Since I'm not even sure that libgtksourceview would work as a static
>  library, I attach a patch enabling this support.  Please rebuild and
>  test the resulting .a, if you can do something useful out of it, I'll
>  consider its inclusion.

I rebuilt the package with the given patch and tried to statically link
it in my application. It worked fine. Please consider its inclusion in
forthcoming version of the gtksourceview debian package.

Many thanks,
Cheers.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -*- Computer Science PhD student @ Uny Bologna, Italy
zack@{cs.unibo.it,debian.org,bononia.it} -%- http://www.bononia.it/zack/
If there's any real truth it's that the entire multidimensional infinity
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