-static packages

[Robert Spanton]

On Wed, 2010-09-15, I wrote:
> 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?

Ok, the it seems that some people got the idea about why I want to be
able to statically link things.  Others seem to have completely
misunderstood [1].

So we have to hack around the situation to achieve what we want that
some other people don't want.  There is an existing tool called
statifier [2], but this doesn't work with VDSO randomisation, so I can't
use that.  Here's a script that takes an ELF file and makes a directory
containing the libraries that it needs to live:

https://www.studentrobotics.org/cgit/rspanton/dynpk.git/tree/

Yup, it has to take the local system's dynamic linker too (RHEL's
dynamic linker made moaning noises about some difference in the way the
ELF file were labelled).  My script also includes an "audit" library
that will force the application to exit if it attempts to load a shared
library from outside the packaged directory.  This approach is working
for me -- and I *think* it's working for dlopen, but this is untested at
this point (I'll fix it when it breaks...).

Notice that the absence of -static packages hasn't actually stopped
users from achieving the same results... all it's done is add a hurdle
of inconvenience.

Cheers,

Rob

[1] Yea, like I'm bothered about the security issues of my simulation!
Other things I also don't care about in this situation:
      * Memory usage: These machines have >32GB.  Size of libraries
        <50MB.  Number of instances of this process per node <= 4.
      * Binary size: Unbelievably insignificant.
      * Library updates: I want my simulations to all be comparable...
[2] http://statifier.sourceforge.net/

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