-static packages

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 06:11:21PM +0200, Jakub Jelinek wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 05:06:20PM +0100, Robert Spanton wrote:
> > I've recently had to link a fair amount of my work statically so that
> > it'll run on a cluster of RHEL machines.  Unfortunately, I am just a
> > user of these machines, and so I don't have the power to get them to run
> > Fedora or even to get the admins to install RHEL packages in a timely
> > manner.  Building statically also helps me to eliminate as many of the
> > inevitable fractional differences between cluster nodes as possible, to
> > achieve reproducible results from simulation runs.
> > 
> > However, only a few packages in Fedora provide -static variants.  This
> > has meant that I've had to locally build these, which is obviously not
> > desirable from a maintenance perspective.
> > 
> > So, would be acceptable to register requests for -static package
> > variants as tickets on bugzilla?  Or is there a better way to try to
> > encourage people to generate these packages?
> 
> Better yet is not to link statically.
> http://www.akkadia.org/drepper/no_static_linking.html

There are times when static linking is a useful.  Robert clearly
describes one in his original post.  I also use static linking as a
way to distribute binaries that will run on a range of Linux
distros[*].

Uli's claim that static linking's benefits "never been the case and
never will be the case" is complete drivel IMHO.

Rich.

[*] In fact, I wrote a nice little script to help:
http://git.annexia.org/?p=libguestfs.git;a=blob;f=relink-static.sh;hb=HEAD

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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