Re: Hardcoding of .la file paths in .la files
I hate to jump in but I really feel the need to correct the below. You
have a good number of points wrong.
On Tue, Oct 14, 2003 at 10:38:49AM +0200, Daniel Kobras wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 14, 2003 at 09:52:28AM +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> > I really feel we should get rid of all these static libraries. Who uses
> > static linking now that even our glibc doesn't support it correctly
> > across versions?
>
> People who want their binaries to run across different Linux machines.
Dynamic linking to an old version of glibc is more portable than
statically linking to any version. Exhibit A is NSS; exhibit B is
iconv. Neither works properly when statically linked unless run
against the exact same glibc version.
> People who don't want to keep up with rapidly changing library APIs.
That's a good reason to statically link to _specific_ libraries.
> People who want to have reliable emergency recovery tools available.
This is not hard to arrange using shared libraries.
> People who use performance critical libs on register-starved machines.
Another good reason for specific static libraries only.
> People who need to minimize startup times.
Static linking does _not_ minimize startup times; in fact it's quite
inefficient. Dynamic linking + prelinking is much faster if you care
about startup times.
> To name but a few. Just because there's little incentive to use static
> linkage when building Debian packages doesn't mean that we should
> deprecate it. Unless you're willing to convince the admin of the
> beowulf cluster next door to install libyoddafoo on several hundred
> nodes for me.
Not that I'm disagreeing with your conclusions; just your reasoning.
--
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer
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