[Fedora-packaging] static linking draft

[Patrice Dumas]

On Mon, Nov 27, 2006 at 10:38:50AM +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> 
> We were addressing this issue from a "distro's point of view" having
> maintainability of the distro itself in mind.

Indeed, but the fact that some nss and iconv things won't work with
statically linked apps seems of relevance to me here.

> 
> > * As showed by the thread 
> > https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2006-November/msg00713.html
> > there is a valid use of static libraries, namely in trusted environements
> > statically linking executables enhance their portability (although, sadly
> > since FC-5 this portability is limited to kernel 2.6.9).
> As many others already pointed out, this claim simply is not true.

As many others have already pointed out, this claim is true. To be
more precise, this claim may be true or not depending on the precise case,
there is no general case (if I understand well, there are some things that
prevent for sure static linking, that should of course be taken into 
account).

> IMO, the fact static linkage appears to work for you ("scientific
> apps"), probably only stems from the simplicity of such applications,
> because such kind of applications typically don't use much of the OS's
> resources. If they were, you'd probably notice the brokenness of this
> approach.

Of course, I have never said something different, and that's why I think
that static libraries shouldn't be packaged for all the packages. I think
it doesn't makes much sense for kde, gnome apps, for example. But for 
data processing and numerical computations, linking statically enhance 
portability a lot, and allow to run binaries on computer the user doesn't
administer.
 
> Our motivation for getting FESCO involved is us wanting to collect a
> list of precedences of cases "when to allow "*-static*" packages".

Ok, that makes sense (more generally, documenting difficult packaging issues
would be interesting), but then it shouldn't be to ask permission, 
only to register the packagers decisions.

> Technically, there never should be any necessity to allow any static
> libraries - I.e. "when to allow exceptions" essentially is a _political_
> decision - That's why we want to get "political organs" involved.

I disagree, it is a technical decision, not a political one.

--
Pat