Re: [PATCH] util-linux: Remove static libraries from -dev packages

[Phil Blundell <philb@gnu.org>]

On Wed, 2012-09-26 at 09:49 +0100, Richard Purdie wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-09-25 at 18:11 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> > On Tue, 2012-09-25 at 23:00 +0100, Phil Blundell wrote:
> > 
> > > That'd be inconsistent with other packages, since we do generally build
> > > and ship the static libraries.  Having a big switch to turn off static
> > > libraries globally seems like a fine plan, but I can't see any obvious
> > > reason why the util-linux ones are any more useless than the rest.
> > 
> > Makes sense.  I wonder if there are actually any users of the static
> > libraries.
> > 
> > For what it's worth in gnome-ostree I do just globally pass
> > --disable-static by default.
> 
> I tested this a while back to see what performance difference it made.
> The answer was "nothing too significant", I don't have the exact timings
> handy. I do remember having to exclude sqlite-native from the list since
> pseudo static links against it.

It's slightly surprising that it doesn't make that much of a difference,
given that building static libraries does essentially double the number
of compilations for library code.  Though, of course, glibc doesn't
support --disable-static nowadays and there might be a few other big
packages that have the same issue.

I guess that if you have enough cores, compilation count becomes
something of a non-issue since it's one of the few things that does
parallelize very well.  It might be interesting to repeat the
measurements of --disable-static on a machine with only a few CPUs and
see whether it makes more of a difference there.

Out of interest, why does pseudo static-link against sqlite anyway?

p.