Static linking considered harmful

[Bill Nottingham]

Olivier Galibert (galibert at pobox.com) said: 
> Ok, so glibc maintains backwards compatibility only for bug-free
> programs.  Show of hands, who has a bug-free program around?

Of course we maintain it for programs that actually use the API
the way they're intended.

Here's an example - we had a bug filed once (this was years ago) about
how someone's app was segfaulting when they tried to execute a helper
program. Why? Because they weren't null-terminating the arguments
to execl()!

They pressed, and pressed - "this worked in RHL 4.2 - you need to support
this!". But, realistically, if your code only worked by accident, you
can't expect it to be supported eternally.

Bill