[Pkg-pciutils-discuss] Killing the shared library

[Matthew Wilcox]

The original reason for having a shared library was for the benefit of
Kudzu:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=212246

However, Kudzu doesn't really need a shared library, it needs -fPIC
objects.  We can build -fPIC objects and either put them in libpci.a or
create a secondary libpci_pic.a library.

I'm anxious to get rid of the libpci.so because upstream doesn't support
a shared library model, and has no committment to ABI stability.  Thus,
any new release is liable to cause us to rev the soname with all the
associated pain.  Since upstream doesn't do shared libraries, binaries
compiled on Debian which link against libpci.so are highly unlikely to
be transportable to other distros, and vice versa.

I'm open to suggestions about how to kill libpci.so, but I want it dead.