Bug#963933: glib2.0: autopkgtext: ld: cannot find -lcryptsetup

[Chris Hofstaedtler]

* Simon McVittie <smcv at debian.org> [200629 01:16]:
> On Sun, 28 Jun 2020 at 22:00:58 +0200, Chris Hofstaedtler wrote:
> > the autopkgtest suite offers quite interesting behaviour:
> > With an installed libcryptsetup-dev, ld fails with "cannot find
> > -lcryptsetup".
> ...
> > I imagine this might be caused by libcryptsetup-dev not shipping an
> > .a library.
> 
> This means that GLib could previously be successfully statically linked
> (and we had a test to prove it), and now it cannot.
> 
> Do you consider this to be a deliberate change? Is statically linking
> a library that depends on libmount no longer supported?

I'm not sure it was a good idea before. Is static linking something
you actively want to support for glib?

For libmount, if we want to support verity, this appears to be out
of the question -- libcryptsetup will always make this impossible.

While turning off verity will give us temporarily a libmount that
can be statically linked again, I can imagine future changes pulling
in libdevice-mapper. Then we'll be in another static-binary-with-dlopen
situation. Which wont't work, AFAIK.
Might be hypothetical, but all this "low level" stuff is quite
dynamic nowadays.

> (If it is, then we might as well stop providing static libraries for
> GLib too, and you might as well stop providing static libraries for
> libmount.)

(Indeed.)

   Chris