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Re: how to make Debian less fragile (long and philosophical)



* Steve Willer said:

> > You're putting too much emphasis on static bins, pure and simple. I've
> > got machines that don't even have dynamic libs, and let me assure you
> > that they're not failure-proof. 
> 
> I don't think it's fair to throw in some reductio ad absurdum like that,
> do you? Nobody is arguing for perfection or "failure-proof" systems. The
> issue is a rather simple one of costs vs. benefits. A very simple issue,
> but of course the details are more complex.
Exactly. If I have a chance to minimize a possibility of the need of a
physical presence at the server hundreds of miles away, then I'll gladly
take it. When such a remote server fails I'd have to waste at least two days
to go there, not to mention gas costs etc. Funny? Not really - I waste time
and money.

> I had reacted in the same way (with hostility) before I thought about it
> really carefully. There's definitely a benefit to having static core
> binaries. For those who administer remote production machines or machines
> where downtime is very bad, the benefit is frankly substantial from a risk
> point of view. So what are the costs? What are they really? As far as I
> can tell, there's a small disk space cost (about 200K per binary) and no
> memory cost. There was some grumbling about the effort involved, but I
> think that was without a full understanding of what was involved.
What effort? As I said before, if there's a decision to do that - I'll
gladly patch all the relevant packages to produce ADDITIONAL set of static
tools. I just want some consensus to be reached, that's all. Otherwise it's
just a matter of installing one, possibly more packages.

regards,
  marek
  

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