On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 11:18:43PM -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
Axel Thimm (Axel.Thimm@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.