[Fedora-packaging] Extending the Static Library Packaging Guidelines to cover inline/template code

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 04/28/2012 04:31 PM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 08:56:20AM -0500, Rex Dieter wrote:
>> On 04/28/2012 04:57 AM, Michael Schwendt wrote:
>>> What does the Packaging Committee think about the following?
>>>
>>> [...]
>>>
>>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/759823  is the review request for libkdtree++
>>>
>>> That is a C++ template container implementation, which does not build a
>>> shared library file to link with, but ships only C++ templates in header
>>> files.
>>>
>>> The resulting -devel package needs to be handled in the same way than
>>> a -static library package. Whenever there are important fixes in the
>>> templates, dependencies may need to be rebuilt. Not limited to security
>>> vulnerabilities. Any bug-fixes in the template implementation would only
>>> propagate to applications when rebuilding the application packages.
>>
>> +1, sounds similar to eigen2-devel and eigen3-devel
>>
> +1 as well.

At first thought, I was inclined to agree, but ...

... where do you want to draw the line between "static template usage" 
and "regular external code usage"?

These days, almost all C++ packages export C++-template headers, which 
occassionally can be used without pulling in explicit library linkage.

Similar considerations apply to plain C-packages which, may contain 
freestanding inline-code and/or freestanding-defines.

I.e. I think this proposal is not clear enough to be applicable.

Ralf