* Roger Leigh (roger@whinlatter.uklinux.net) wrote: > I used a statically-linked binary just a few days ago. I needed to > resize an NTFS partition on a newly-delivered system which came with > Windows XP. In the event, I was able to get a statically linked > binary, copy it onto a floppy and run this after booting from a rescue > disk. > > So, it's very useful for rescue situations, where you can't rely on a > whole suite of shared libs, or any installation at all. Boot Knoppix or similar from a CD. PCs today are more often installed with CDs than floppies anyway. That's really a pretty poor reason. > It's also useful when you want to provide something that "just work" > with no extra dependencies. While proprietary/commercial software was > the biggest user of this, it's also useful for free software. What if > Joe Average would like to run my program which makes use of libstdc++, > GTK+ 2.2 and GNOME 2.4? It's the least hassle way to achieve this. Joe Average installs Debian which *handles* all of the dependencies. Come on, this isn't even a reason to keep them. > > Regardless, we shouldn't be using them and the end > > users and local admins who actually need to link against things > > statically can figure out the dependencies. > > Since nearly all -dev packages come with static libs and this is not > forbidded (it's mentioned in Policy) I won't stop using them. I'll by > happy to stop as soon as Policy forbids/discourages it. Policy follows current action more than it forces changes. Regardless, it doesn't actually hurt anything to include static libs except disk space on the mirrors (something I don't tend to worry myself over too much) so while we *shouldn't*, as long as it doesn't *hurt* things, I don't care. Using them as an excuse to include .la files isn't valid because .la files break other things. > On a related note, I'd also be very happy if it was a requirement to > build libraries with a miniumum of "-g -ggdb -gdwarf-2", and not strip > them. We could provide some mechanism to automatically strip > binaries, surely? This doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I certainly hope you're not trying to say we should ship not-stripped *anything* by default. Libraries make up a large part of the archive and having them not be stripped would cause users to have to download *alot* of crap they're very likely to not be interested in. A much better solution, which is already being worked on and I think may be working in part at least, is -dbg packages. These increase the size the mirror uses, which I realize some people are concerned about, but doesn't increase the amount of crap a user has to download unless they ask for it specifically. Stpehen
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