On Sun, May 27, 2007 at 04:27:02PM +0100, Jonathan Underwood wrote:
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.
I have exactly the opposite experience. I have issues with g77/gfortran incompatibilities, for example. Or missing libraries on platform I am not administrator. Or libraries with different sonames. In what case did you have 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.
Why not?
If you're looking for that sort of portability, you should be using a consistent and reliable platform for the calculations, like RHEL.
What a bizarre suggestion. Fedora should be good for numerical models. If fedora isn't good for that RHEL wont be either.
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.
I don't want to give false ideas, in many real life cases statically linking numerical models gave a binary that gave a similar result on all the platforms. I prefer educating people that believe that static linking doesn't bring in portability.
-- Pat