On Tue, 2003-09-30 at 12:14, Ken Schneider wrote: [snip]
The whole point is that a statically linked program will be larger then a dynamically linked one. There is no disadvantage if this is the only program that requires this library.
Very true, if that is the only program that uses the library. As it is,
the library is provided by mozilla, and a goodly number of people have
mozilla installed to allow Galeon to run, so the library will be present
on the system anyway. And if mozilla/Galeon is used, you will have one
copy of the library in RAM from the dynamic linker and one copy present
in the statically linked Gaim.
One alternative solution would have been to have a pre-install checker
of Gaim looking for the library required, updated ld.so.conf and run
ldconfig before installing Gaim itself. Bit OTT perhaps.. :)
A benefit of statically linked programs is a slight performance boost
when running as it does not have to go through the dynamic linker to
reach functions in the libraries while a drawback is a slightly longer
loadtime as there is a little more to load from disk as well as higher
memory usage if more than one program utilises the library in question.
Regards,
--
Anders Karlsson