Re: get rid static libraries or fix them

["James Henstridge" <james jamesh id au>]

On 08/02/07, Stanislav Brabec <sbrabec suse cz> wrote:
> Tristan Van Berkom wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >    Currently I dont see anything wrong with the state of affairs at all.
>
> I see: Many GNOME *.pc files are broken, because Libs.private required
> for static linking are missing. Default configure options are
> inconsistent, causing even more problems.

Libs.private was actually added for the purposes of dynamic linking.
If a library depends on another library but doesn't expose the fact in
its API, listing it in Libs.private or Requires.private does the
following:
* the dependent library still gets checked for by "pkg-config --exists"
* the dependent library does not get listed in the linker flags, so
apps don't end up with a DT_NEEDED record for it.

The upshot being that libraries whose API the app doesn't depend on
don't become direct dependencies of the app.  In the static linking
case, Libs.private is considered equivalent to Libs.

If you find things missing from Requires.private or Libs.private for a
package, please report bugs.

James.