static libs ... again

Warren Togami wtogami at redhat.com
Sat Feb 18 07:43:10 UTC 2006


Patrice Dumas wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> I never had to do anything funny to compile statically my numerical models.
> But it is very possible that my use (scientific numerical models) are not 
> a target for Fedora, which is more targeted for network and desktop?
> (and yes, of course I can recompile myself the numerical libs I use, liek
> gsl, lapack, fftw, and redistribute them at the labs where I have some 
> fedora, as rpm or with other mean). But it is a waste of time and resources 
> if there is a more widespread use.

IMHO, if you are building your own numerical crunching apps, then you 
probably would be better off controlling all aspects of building each 
static portion of it.  This means writing your own scripts and tuning 
compile flags of portions of the app to maximize performance.  This may 
also mean applying your own patches that may be unsuitable for a more 
general purpose distribution.

If you rely on a distribution's static libraries, then there is no 
guarantee in the future that those static libs will remain unchanged in 
API, so if you ever need to rebuild your app with a tiny change you 
could be affected by far more than the change that you expected.

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com




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