On Sun, May 27, 2007 at 07:59:44PM +0100, Jonathan Underwood wrote:
A program statically linked with GMP running on two different platforms giving different answers.
That's not surprising. I never made the assumption that the results of the binaries would be exactly the same.
Fedora is usually based on the latest glibc. Segfaults seem to ensue when running a statically linked binary compiled on Fedora with a system with an earlier glibc.
I never experienced that.
Yeah, I phrased the poorly. I use Fedora daily for numerical work. What i meant was, if you're really loking for a reliable and reproducible setup for running numerical calcs based on static linking
I am not wanting that, not at all. I just want to be able to run the numerical model on the other platform, not to have the same results. For some models I also expect the results to be the same, but not in all cases.
and distributing binaries, you wouldn't want to use a distro with rapid ABI turnover.
Certainly more important is the hardware.
Right - that's what I meant the last sentence - so why go to the bother of making statically linkable libraries available if it doesn't actually achieve the goal of producing portable binaries, but rather gives people false hope. That's what I'd call wasting people's time, or giving them a noose to hang themselves with.
I am not saying that the results will be the same. I don't want to achieve reproducability, I just want a binary that runs on that platform. I don't expect a chaotic model to give the same results, for example.
It seems to me that the use case doesn't justify what you're asking for though. The solution you're proposing (allowing users to link statically to system wide libraries) doesn't achieve the goal (producing "run anywhere" binaries). As Matthias pointed out, if
It does so. At least for me binaries linked on fedora may be run on centos4 with a different set of libraries/compilers.
someone is hell bent on producing statically linked binaries, then they can download the source for the libraries they need and build and link statically against them.
Of course, but it would be way better for them if we could help them.
-- Pat