Bug 203538

Maybe it is the right time to make that change
such that it leaves time to workaround things that break?

The popt.3 man page should also be in -devel.

Nothing will break, It Really Does'nt Matter. *shrug*

repoquery --whatrequires libpopt.so.0
gives 225 results, so I guess some of them would have to add
a BuildRequires: popt-devel.

popt is installed where rpm is installed. so libpopt.so.0 is guaranteed to be present when a *.spec parser 
is present.

(In reply to comment #4)
> popt is installed where rpm is installed. so libpopt.so.0 is guaranteed to be
present when a *.spec parser 
> is present.

Indeed, and this is not my point. My point is that the devel parts of popt
should not be installed with the shared libs.

repoquery --whatrequires libpopt.so.0 is here only to give an idea of
what packages would need popt-devel as BuildRequires. rpm would figure
out the dependencies on sonames automatically anyway.

Then your
    rpm -q --whatrequires libpopt.so.0 | wc -l
test is flawed, what really needs to be (and is not adequately imho)
tracked is which dependencies are needed by -devel and which are
needed for functioning non-devel packages.

No matter what, you're in for largish package rebuilding, hardly worth
the effort to be conformant with a
    Though shalt put the libfoo.so -> ... symlink in a -devel package.

The popt package contains 36 files:
    30 LC_MESSAGES catalogs
     1 man page
     1 static library
     1 include file
     1 shared library
     2 symlinks
and you wish to move 2 (or perhaps the man page too) into a -devel package.

Go fer it! Get rid of the static library while you're at it, FC has already removed libpopt.la ...

(In reply to comment #6)
> Then your
>     rpm -q --whatrequires libpopt.so.0 | wc -l
> test is flawed, 

It is only to give a rough idea of the number of packages impacted by 
a split of popt-devel.

> what really needs to be (and is not adequately imho)
> tracked is which dependencies are needed by -devel and which are
> needed for functioning non-devel packages.

That's the point in splitting every packages in a -devel and a non-devel 
part. It is almost done at the level of fedora. It is already done for 
fedora extras, since it is a must item in the guidelines, and it should 
be done anyway during the review of core packages for the merge.

> No matter what, you're in for largish package rebuilding, hardly worth
> the effort to be conformant with a
>     Though shalt put the libfoo.so -> ... symlink in a -devel package.

It is certainly painful, and not a vital need. However moving
-devel stuff to a subpackage ensures that only the packages requiring
explicitly the -devel package (be it indirectly) ends up with the possibility
to link against that package in the buildroot. It helps doing reproducible
builds. Moreover it is a prerequisite to have multilib enabled -devel 
packages.

> The popt package contains 36 files:
>     30 LC_MESSAGES catalogs
>      1 man page
>      1 static library
>      1 include file
>      1 shared library
>      2 symlinks
> and you wish to move 2 (or perhaps the man page too) into a -devel package.

Yes, the man page is also for -devel. The size of the -devel (or main) 
package isn't really important, in my opinion, the split is done for the
reasons exposed above, the packages sizes don't matter. An added benefit
is that it reduces the size of non devel packages, though admitedly for 
popt the gain is low, and negligible if the static lib is removed.

> Go fer it! Get rid of the static library while you're at it, FC has already
removed libpopt.la ...

I am personally against removing the static libraries. There is 
a great pressure in fedora to remove them, but it is a separate 
issue.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 249352 ***