[mercury-users] Newbie question: what all these folders for?

[Julien Fischer]

On Fri, 3 Oct 2008, Peter Lemenkov wrote:

> Hello All!
> Thanks for helping, Julien!
>
> 2008/9/30, Julien Fischer <juliensf at csse.unimelb.edu.au>:
>>
>>  On Tue, 30 Sep 2008, Peter Lemenkov wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Hello All!
>>> I finally compiled Mercury and build RPM for it, but some things still
>>> remains unclear for me.
>>>
>>> I found that compiled Mercury has very complex layout - there are many
>>> different directories with content mysterious for newbies. Namely
>
> [sorry, skipped]
>
>>> * lib - also stronlgy required for Mercury to work. There are some
>>> static libraries inside - we (at Fedora) have strict policy not to
>>> package static libs until it would be absolutely necessary - I think
>>> that's exactly the very case.
>>
>>  In general both static and shared versions of the libraries are
>>  installed.
> So does it means that I can safely remove all static (*.a) libraries?
> As I said this is a strong requirement of Fedora Packaging Guide.

You could do that although anyone who attempts to compile
with --mercury-linkage=static is going to be in for a surprise ;-)
(It is not uncommon to want to do that so that one can distribute
executables that work on systems that do not have the Mercury libraries
installed.)
I am concerned that not including the static versions may cause users to think
the installation is broken.
I imagine that the packaging guidelines were formulated for use with
C or C++ libraries.  What is appropriate for those languages may _not_
necessarily be appropriate for Mercury.  I would also note that Ocaml
seems to have an exemption to the static linking parts of the Fedora packaging
guidelines.

Cheers,
Julien.
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