[Fedora-packaging] paragraph on shipping static numerical libs

[Jonathan Underwood]

On 27/05/07, Matthias Clasen <mclasen at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 2007-05-27 at 10:15 +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
>
> > I only advocate shipping static libraries, no statically linked packages
> > against those libraries. These libs are for use for locally compiled
> > programs, not for packages shipped with fedora. So no maintainance
> > issue.
> >
>
> The obvious question is, if this is only for locally compiled programs,
> why not compile the necessary static libraries locally as well ? Why
> should we carry that burden ?

+10,0000.

I regard myself as falling into the niche of scientic/numerical
programming. However, I see no advantage to myself being able to
compile staticly linked binaries in the name of portability. It
doesn't really gain much, and actually I have seen doing such things
give rather bizarre results.

Besides which, if you were to want to statically link a binary and
send it to run elsewhere, Fedora isn't the platform to be doing it on.
If you're looking for that sort of portability, you should be using a
consistent and reliable platform for the calculations, like RHEL.

The right fix here is to educate scientific programmers as to why
statically linking in libraries doesn't actually get them what they
want, and that it is broken.

Jonathan.