Shared vs Static (please read)

[Peter Arremann]

On Thursday 15 December 2005 18:48, Peter Jr. Quiring wrote:
> I can see Linux (possibly Fedora) taking on Windows head-to-head some day,
> but without static libs Fedora would be crippling our options and force
> some of us to other options.

There has been much discussion about this over the years but eventually it 
always comes down to the fact that shared libraries are the way the Unix 
world has been going. 

There are two reasonable things you can do: 

1) Get over it. Then you will have to compile and (should) package separately 
for different platforms (RHEL, Fedora, SuSE, Debian, ...) 

2) Package the shared libraries. You still should package for the different 
platforms (which then leaves the questions on why you don't just compile for 
them specifically). Then, write a wrapper shell script and either uses 
LD_LIBRARY_PATH or LD_PRELOAD (depends on if you already loaded libs to be 
loaded or not) and then executes the real binary...

Of course if you do 2, then you'll get lots of people that will complain the 
packaging... If you're serious, I can only recommend that you do it like 
everyone else does...

Peter.