Re: who is looking for a new distro as a result of systemd (particularly server-side users)
* On 2014 13 Oct 14:43 -0500, Carl Fink wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 03:01:00PM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
> > On Mon, 13 Oct 2014 14:02:16 -0400
> > Carl Fink <carl@finknetwork.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Slackware springs to mind.
> >
> > Before this, I would have said that slackware sucks. From what I
> > understand, they're proud that their package manager doesn't support
> > dependencies. Saaaay whaaaat?
The philosophy is that it is up to the sysadmin to install the
dependencies. If a full installation is done and left alone, all will
be fine. But then, Slackware is not billed as a rolling release, AIUI.
Debian has spoiled me in this regard.
> At this point I'm ready to propose SOS, aka "StaticOS", where every binary
> is statically compiled to include all dependencies. RAM is cheap and it
> would make everything compatible with everything else.
Good luck with that. Since a lot of libraries are built with libtool
and since later versions of libtool don't support static builds very
well, or not at all when the library uses dlopen'd modules, you will
find this rather tricky indeed. I dealt with just that situation a year
or so ago as a CVE had forced the project I help maintain to stop
bundling an old version of libtool a couple of years before. One of the
lost features was the ability to roll the library into a single static
blob even though it utilized dlopen'd modules. A downstream user pushed
the issue until one of the contributors excised our use of the dlopen
feature last year. Now the modules and the main library are built into
one large .so blob which can easily be a static library as well. We
really didn't lose anything as we were loading every module anyway even
in the dlopen days.
This will likely be an issue you'd run into.
> No, I'm not serious. Kinda.
Even so, some things just won't be so easy. The GNU Autotools build
chain philosophy is to build everything dynamically linked and avoid
static linking unless absolutely necessary (generally limited to
platforms that don't support dynamic linking well or not at all). At
one time I had looked at Cmake for another reason but abandoned that
path as I recall libtool would have still be required for our library
build. That may no longer be the case, but I have learned Autotools
well enough for our project to no longer care to change the build tool
chain.
- Nate
--
"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true."
Ham radio, Linux, bikes, and more: http://www.n0nb.us
Reply to: