Static linking considered harmful

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Wed, 2006-11-22 at 05:08 -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.
> 
> So, I think it would be best if we could analyze what in FC7/FE7
> is linked statically, why, if it really needs to be linked that way
> and what *.a libraries does it link in and kill all other *.a libraries
> (unless the library is only in *.a form, examples libbfd.a,
> libc_nonshared.a, libpthread_nonshared.a, libsupc++.a, libgfortranbegin.a)
> and kill all other libraries.
> 
> E.g. ideally we'd drop libpthread.a, librt.a, libstdc++.a, libgfortran.a,
> libboost*.a, all GUI libs that have also *.so libs, etc.
> 
> Thoughts?
Excellent proposal, way over due.

Also, the FPC had accepted proposal aim at similar objectives a couple
of weeks ago:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/StaticLinkage

Ralf