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

[Chris Hofstaedtler]

* Simon McVittie <smcv at debian.org> [200630 11:23]:
> On Tue, 30 Jun 2020 at 10:51:39 +0200, Chris Hofstaedtler wrote:
> > I'm not sure it was a good idea before. Is static linking something
> > you actively want to support for glib?
> 
> It has worked in the past, Policy says the static library "is usually
> provided", and we occasionally get bug reports from people who want to
> link random libraries statically, so I didn't feel comfortable with
> unilaterally disabling it for no particular reason. The autopkgtest
> is there partly because things we don't test usually don't work, and
> partly because static linking to libmount regressed during GLib's move
> from Autotools to Meson (the pkg-config metadata in GLib was wrong);
> I added it to confirm that the regression fix had been effective.
> 
> If I'm disabling the static library because dependencies no longer
> support it, then I can redirect bug reporters to the dependency and
> let them argue their case there if they want to (as with libdbus, which
> can't be linked statically any more due to libsystemd).

Understood.

Feel free to point people at libmount/src:util-linux.

I'll see about removing libmount's static library in the -dev
package.

> People occasionally try to change Policy to say that static equivalents
> of shared libraries are definitely optional, or even that they are
> discouraged, but this never reaches consensus, because someone always
> appears and says "well actually, I rely on Debian shipping shared libfoo
> and libbar for armhf so that I can statically link them into a binary
> for my embedded frobnicator device, which
> (has glibc from 2005|doesn't have glibc|doesn't have space for glibc|...)".
> The obvious counterpoint that solving this is not really Debian's job
> is rarely effective.
> 
> It is technically possible to link just the top of a dependency stack
> statically (for example a GLib program with static GLib and libmount,
> but dynamic libcryptsetup and glibc), but pkg-config doesn't make this
> straightforward and in practice it requires hard-coding paths to static
> libraries, so the autopkgtest in GLib doesn't attempt to exercise this.

Thanks for the explanation!

Best,
Chris