On Wed, 2008-04-09 at 09:27 -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
Since spot was the person who described it to me, perhaps it would be best to get his input here. The way he stated it was that if there were static libs around at link time, they would get automatically linked, even if the didn't want them to.
A lot of packages will look first for static libraries, then if (and only if) they are not found, look for shared libraries. By splitting into static and static-noshared, we can safely put in -devel and -static-noshared and avoid this confusion.
~spot