[Fedora-packaging] Re: paragraph on shipping static numerical libs

[Bill Nottingham]

Axel Thimm (Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net) said: 
> And I only mentioned that the Linux part is homogeneous. Ever wondered
> why the majority of Unix admins that have skills in managing
> heterogeneous Unix system have a physicist's background? It is far
> more important to have a good mips/$ and some scientists on salary,
> than to spend all budget for the IT staff's system management.

If you are spending all the budget for IT staff to do system management,
you're doing it wrong; there's no reason that systems management should
be on the par you're talking about. There are places that run hundreds
to thousands of machines with a single administrator. Honestly? It sounds
like a vicious cycle of "we don't think we have the time to set up
a consistent platform, so we don't, so we have to spend too much time
managing it, so we don't have the time to set up a new platform..."

> > If you want consistent results, run a consistent platform.
> 
> So you outrule Fedora? Because consistent means even more than a
> stable API/ABI, RHEL comes close to that, but switching to RHEL
> because a distro does not want to offer static libs is not reason
> enough, especially in light of development of key components like
> gfortran that is reflected in RHEL only a couple years after it makes
> it into the non-enterprise platforms.

RHEL doesn't even *ship* this scientific stuff, for a large part.

All I'm saying is that we shouldn't continue to support this sort of
fundamentally-unsupportable setup ad nauseam - it's time to think about
how to solve this in a sane manner, rather than continuing to paper
over the problem. I don't see how, at a minium, moving the static
libraries to -static packages changes things - if, as you say, everyone
just chucks libraries manually in /usr/local, then how is this making
anything worse for them?

Bill