Static linking considered harmful

[David Zeuthen]

On Wed, 2006-11-22 at 05:08 -0500, Jakub Jelinek wrote:
> Removing libc.a would be most effective,

Yes, please consider doing that, it sounds pretty effective.

>  but I'm afraid we still need
> a handful of statically linked binaries for boot time initialization and
> system recovery utilities.

I think it would be nice to avoid even that, it takes up lots of disk
space, see [1] which makes Fedora somewhat less appealing for embedded
use - such as OLPC where there probably is still a few statically linked
binaries that are completely useless on such a system.

Note that SUSE just includes the glibc and other required DSO's in the
initramfs; I did the same for my livecd stuff (that has a rather
complicated initramfs to setup dm-snapshot for rw rootfs) and it works
very nicely.

So it's definitely possibly but I'd expect some resistance from certain
package maintainers :-)

     David

[1] : this is just _some_ of the statically linked binaries on my system

$ du -c -h `find /sbin/ -iname "*.static"`
780K    /sbin/kpartx.static
4.0K    /sbin/restore.static
4.0K    /sbin/rrestore.static
4.0K    /sbin/dump.static
840K    /sbin/dmsetup.static
4.0K    /sbin/rdump.static
792K    /sbin/udevd.static
460K    /sbin/insmod.static
744K    /sbin/mdadm.static
1.6M    /sbin/lvm.static
964K    /sbin/dmraid.static
620K    /sbin/mdassemble.static
6.7M    total