Re: Shipping static libraries

[Gabor Gombas <gombasg@sztaki.hu>]

On Thu, Nov 03, 2005 at 09:55:07AM +0000, Ross Burton wrote:

> Did it load images?  The gdk-pixbuf loaders are dlopened.  Was Pango
> statically linked? That dlopens the modules the scripts.  Obviously the
> application used the default theme, as theme engines are dlopened.
> 
> If the static libraries handle these cases then excellent, but otherwise
> a non-trivial static GTK+ application isn't usable.

This is often not the issue though. It is quite common to build only
_some_ of the libraries statically. Module loading is an orthogonal
issue, statically linked applications may still use dynamically loaded
modules.

In fact, right now you cannot build a fully static application on a
Debian system as glibc will always load the NSS modules dynamically
(unless you rebuild glibc with the --enable-static-nss option).

I'm not certain about the level of module ABI compatibility gtk
provides, but for example, it might be possible to link gtk-2.8
statically into an application and still be able to run the binary on a
system that only has gtk-2.4 installed. In this case, the application
can use any new features from gtk-2.8 while it still uses the modules
from gtk-2.4.

Gabor

-- 
     ---------------------------------------------------------
     MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute
                Hungarian Academy of Sciences
     ---------------------------------------------------------