[Fedora-packaging] static linking draft

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Mon, 2006-11-27 at 10:11 +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I think that the 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/StaticLinkage
> could be ameliorated, 
Well, FPC's vote on this proposal had been unanimous.

Nevertheless, I am open to listen to further proposals.

> and also I am opposed to one point.

> * I think that in the motivation a link to Ulrich page could be
>   a good thing, since there are other valid arguments listed there:
> http://people.redhat.com/drepper/no_static_linking.html
Ulrich is approaching this issue from a completely different angle.

We were addressing this issue from a "distro's point of view" having
maintainability of the distro itself in mind.

> * 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.

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.

> * I think that asking for FESCO permission to ship a static lib is wrong,
> for 3 reasons. One is that packagers may know better than FESCO members if 
> the package is in his area of expertise. Second because I think it is not
> the FESCO role to participate in reviews. For me FESCO is about general 
> issues, or last resort arbitrage in case of dispute, and there is enough 
> work for FESCO already with those issues. If FESCO is meant to be involved
> in reviews, it should grow in size over time. And the third reason is that
> it unnecessarily slow down things and add work to reviewers/submitters.
Our motivation for getting FESCO involved is us wanting to collect a
list of precedences of cases "when to allow "*-static*" packages".

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.

Ralf