Re: Development packages.
On Mon, Mar 22, 2004 at 08:54:17PM +0000, Roger Leigh 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.
It should be much simpler and faster to copy the existing binary and its
shared library dependencies from a running system than to recompile the
program from source. It would probably be larger, so you might need to
compress it to fit onto a floppy, but it still seems easier.
If you need more than a "quick fix", a rescue CD is the way to go, as others
have mentioned.
> 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.
The Debian packaging system is another way to accomplish the same goal
(among other things), and I find it preferable to static linking. :-)
> 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?
We can do better than that. See dh_strip --dbg-package=.
--
- mdz
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