MinGW/Packaging issues

This page contains potential (maybe not real) issues with the current MinGW packaging guidelines. These are things which should be discussed when we review these guidelines.

*.la files

What are they used for? Are they necessary?

See: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/fedora-mingw/2009-March/001001.html

*.def files

What are they used for? Are they necessary?

See: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=467420#c7 and http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/fedora-mingw/2009-February/000437.html

devel package split

Currently all MinGW packages are development packages, and so there is no package/package-devel split. Should we do this or is it an unnecessary waste of time? But if we'd like to support static libs then it wouldn't it be better to create -static and -devel pacakges for all packages (like in native version) and put those common stuff into the base packages (like docs, license, exe).

Executable permissions on various linker files

Some linker files (particularly *.dll.a and *.def) get +x permissions. Apparently libtool creates them this way. Since libtool is very fragile, we have tried not to adjust permissions on existing packages. But why are they like this? Is it necessary?

Link to mingw32-example.spec is incorrect

Link should always point to the latest version, which is: http://git.annexia.org/?p=fedora-mingw.git;a=blob;f=example/mingw32-example.spec;hb=HEAD

No duplicate documentation

The manpages and info files section should be extended to cover all duplicate documentation, eg. README files. The only exception we allow at the moment is the license file.