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?
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.