https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=481502 User er258@cam.ac.uk added comment https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=481502#c5 --- Comment #5 from Edward Rosten <er258@cam.ac.uk> 2009-03-03 11:52:04 MST ---
They are harmless to anyone who does not opt for them and invaluable in certain circumstances.
http://people.redhat.com/drepper/no_static_linking.html additionally with the killer arguments in that document, we have to ensure that
The arguments are not killer arguments. They are correct in many cases. Except, crucially the last argument: "The often used argument about statically linked apps being more portable (i.e., can be copied to other systems and simply used since there are no dependencies) is not true since every non-trivial program needs dynamic linking at least for one of the reasons mentioned above. And dynamic linking kills the portability of statically linked apps." which is a variation of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. My programs are not trivial, they simply don't do anything which requires dynamic linking. I would strongly suspect that this is the case for a lot of scientific code: it loads some data, churns through a bunch of arrays for a number of hours, writes some data and then quits. The points don't apply, because the code is frequently rebuilt, security isn't an issue, a small number of instances run (binary size in memory doesn't matter), no complex features of libc are used and debugging is performed on the local machine using a dynamically linked executable. The end result is that running on clusters becomes much more difficult, since with static linking, a rather more complex and error prone distribution process is required.
1) packages that we ship do not use them, when you have a few, it is easy, when you have thousands it is a lost battle.
I was under the impression that dynamic linking was always used unless specified manually during the build process, but I may be mistaken.
You will have to live with it.
That is a shame. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.