static RPM utils (was Re: Suggestion: Static libs policy, a draft)

[Tarhon-Onu Victor]

On Tue, 28 Nov 2006, Japheth J.C. Cleaver wrote:

> Side question: Is rpm compiled statically? *checks* ...  nope. If 
> anything is going to remain statically compiled on the system, I'd say 
> package management tools would be good candidates too, for this very 
> reason.

 	Well, I think it's a little bit complicated that that. RPM 
manipulates the same database as yum does. That database (I'm talking 
about the files in /var/lib/rpm/) is in Berkley DB format.
 	So if something changes in the Berkley DB API for some reason 
(version/format change as it was from 3 to 4?) then all the tools should 
still be able to open those files.
 	In order to accomplish this and also to have the RPM utils 
statically compiled you will have to compile statically (or at least to 
compile statically the BDB support) a lot of tools like Python, used by 
yum. And this is not feasible, I think. Keeping a statically compiled 
python binary (and maybe some other libraries and/or binaries) somewhere 
on the filesystem could be a solution, but it's more like an ugly hack 
than a feature.

 	Moreover, I think that static linking might be a step backwards in 
time. If you remove or by some stupid or good reason (and there are so few 
reasons for this to happen in real life...) some important libraries (like 
libc.so.6) in your system are damaged then... that's life: boot from a CD 
and rpm -Uhv --force -r /mount/point or rpm2cpio are your friends.

-- 
Victor Tarhon-Onu
Lead Systems Administrator
ActiveMedia Technology
http://www.activemediatech.com
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