After a number of rants from Branden I rather confused now as to why xlibs-pic exists at all. As best as I can tell through the froth, Branden is saying that absolutely no static libs should be linked into a shared lib. The conventional wisdom on debian-powerpc seems to be that this should be extended a tad to allow for programs that will need more work upstream. So that it should be...
absolutely no static libs, that have not been built with -fPIC/-fpic, will be linked into a shared lib. The only statement I can find in the debian policy simply states... All libraries must have a shared version in the lib* package and a static version in the lib*-dev package. The shared version must be compiled with -fPIC, and the static version must not be. In other words, each *.c file will need to be compiled twice. This seems to be different from what I recall from only a few weeks ago when it seemed to only say shared libs must be built with -fPIC and nothing about static not being built that way. So what is really correct? It would seem that xlibs-pic seems to only encourage breaking the current new stricter policy on shared libs not containing static libs. I am very unclear as to what is the approved fix then. If something like libsdl-image should not link any static lib (even built with -fPIC) into its shared libs, then what use is xlibs-pic at all? If we are going to enforce this darconian rule then xlibs-pic should be depreciated out of xfree86 since it can't actually be used without violating current debian policy. Nice Catch22. Jack ps I didn't realize some parts of England were only recently, and partially, civilized (grin).