Static linking considered harmful

[Andrew Haley]

Patrice Dumas writes:
 > On Wed, Nov 22, 2006 at 05:08:00AM -0500, Jakub Jelinek wrote:
 > > Hi!
 > > 
 > > We should more proactively discourage static linking in FC7+, for
 > > reasons for that see
 > > http://people.redhat.com/drepper/no_static_linking.html
 > > 
 > > Removing libc.a would be most effective, but I'm afraid we still need
 > > a handful of statically linked binaries for boot time initialization and
 > > system recovery utilities.
 > 
 > Not only. There are cases when all those issues are moot, a prominent one 
 > being for numerical models. Compiling models statically makes it possible
 > to run them on any other linux (including different fedora version) box 
 > without recompiling. So all the libraries that can be used for numerical 
 > computations should have static libraries kept.

This seems like a non sequitur.  What's special about numerical
computations?

Andrew.