static libs ... again

[Linus Walleij]

I think I get the users point by guessing and extrapolating:

Some large-scale installations will have something like /usr/local mounted 
onto a share in order to provide common applications for all users 
through this share. This is an old (IMHO bad) habit especially of former 
SunOS sysadmins. It is especially comfortable when installing a lot of 3rd 
party binary-only software. Many will use something like "modules" to set 
up a lot of userland variables to get this going etc.

This means a user of several distributions and different versions of the 
same distribution will need to compile things statically to get them work 
somewhat on all Linux machines that mounts this share, given that their 
ABI:s may vary wildly.

So while these people appreciate dynamic linking for the most common stuff 
that sits on the local client, they still want static linking available 
for their sysadmin daily tasks like this.

While such people have a niche use of static libs, we all know that the 
actual USE of static libs require a lot of hands-on and funny compiler 
flags.

For this reason I think these people are very able of installing the whole 
shebang and its dependencies from source and not ask their distributor to 
provide them with tools for this. Alternatively use another distribution 
which love to build things from source (Slackware, Gentoo) for this work: 
it is more fitted and not Fedora's ecological niche.

So if reasons like this is behind these request, IMHO we should just say 
"no" to static libs...

My Euro 0.01
Linus