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

[Axel Thimm]

On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 11:18:43PM -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Axel Thimm (Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net) said: 
> > > 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?
> > 
> > No problem at all with moving away static libs into their subpackage!
> > But the thread went on to claim that static libs are not useful in
> > general, and some people including myself just showed the typical use
> > cases where it makes very much sense to have static libs around.
> 
> They aren't useful *in general*.

When I wrote that the claim is false that they are not useful in
general, I didn't mean that "they are always useful", the opposite is
that "there are many cases where statically linking makes very much
sense".

> It's supporting an outmoded, inefficient mode of use (shuffling
> libraries and binaries around between machines and OSes), and it's
> no different than various other outmoded, inefficient, past
> UNIX-isms. We don't support every app parsing the password file (or
> more) - we support authenticating via PAM. We don't support making
> cdrecord setuid - we support fixing the kernel to DTRT. We don't
> encourage logging in as root to do all tasks - we support
> consolehelper, and moving to things like consolekit and separated
> helpers from their UI frontends. We don't support creating specific
> groups to own devices - we support pam_console and then ACLs added
> via ConsoleKit.

IMHO you're comapring apples and organges. Statically linking has
nothing to do with being modern or outmoded, we're not in the fashion
business ;)

Statically linking means to closely (and efficiently!) bundle all bits
that are needed to run together at a given time. No worries if your
update of the gsl of lapack will influence the numerical precision duo
to ieee746 shortcuts, no worries if the other machine has a different
set of runtime libs (like missing some). That has nothing to do with
modernism.

> We don't support every single usage case that people want in Fedora

Sure, that's why I asked previously in this thread whether the
scientifc gorups are considered worth supporting or not.

> - it's about trying to solve the problems in the right ways that
> scale going forward.

The moment you present a better alternative than statically linking
people will listen.
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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