On Tue, Oct 22, 2002 at 03:53:37PM -0700, Jeff Bailey wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 22, 2002 at 05:49:46PM -0500, Zed Pobre wrote:
> > > Sadly, your rant is too late. =) 2.3.1-3 provides an upgrade path
> > > by providing compatability with old static binaries. They will
> > > break at some point in the future, but any static
> > > binaries/libraries compiled against 2.3 will continue to be fine.
>
> > I am confused. I can confirm that it is *not* true that static
> > binaries compiled against 2.2 (i.e. woody libc6) will function with
> > 2.3.1-3,
>
> Hmm. I'll need a testcase then, because the testcases we have now
> work.
The two big ones here are Mathematica (sadly, I am going to be
unable to provide you with a copy of this, though I'll cheerfully run
experimental versions of libc to help test) and zsh-static.
> I can't promise you a length of time in the future. The problem is
> that statically linked binaries on systems using glibc (So, GNU/Linux,
> GNU/Hurd, GNU/FreeBSD) are not entirely statically linked. They still
> reference NSS DSO's. There's no promise of infinite forward
> compatability.
This is a major problem -- this means that producers of
binary-only software have no way of reliably producing a working
binary under an arbitrary Debian release (or, for that matter, under
any glibc-based distribution), and while I am somewhat sympathetic to
a viewpoint of not greatly supporting non-free software", I'm also in
a position of having to use and support a fair amount of it because
there is no free equivalent. Is there any way to get the NSS code
also statically linked? I have a memory of this not being a problem
at one point in the past.
--
Zed Pobre <zed@debian.org> a.k.a. Zed Pobre <zed@resonant.org>
PGP key and fingerprint available on finger; encrypted mail welcomed.
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