On Tue, Feb 05, 2013 at 04:36:44PM +0100, Joachim Breitner wrote: > At least to me my work on Haskell in Debian feels more than pretending, > and from personal experience with the creators of the language, I have > strong doubts that they are Idiots. > > In fact I don’t see how you can have modern features like > cross-module-inlining without having to potentially recompile depending > packages. > > And it is clearly not (anymore) the case that ABIs are not handled in > Haskell. In fact they are handled in a very precise way that allows us > to guarantee on the package level that user’s installations won’t get > broken. I think our priorities should be the user’s experience, and we > should be willing to accept a little infrastructural complications on > our side for that goal.
It's not a matter of "a little infrastructural complication", it's about having the slightest chance of reasonable security support -- or even regular bug fixes, when multiple layers of libraries are involved. If there is a bug in library A, if you use static linking, you need to rebuild every single library B that uses A, then rebuild every C that uses B, then finally every single package in the archive that uses any of these libraries. Just imagine what would happen if libc6 would be statically linked, and a security bug happens inside (like, in the stub resolver). Rebuilding the world on every update might be viable for a simple scientific task[1], but not at all for a distribution. Static linking also massively increases memory and disk use; this has obvious performance effects if there's more than one executable running on the system. [1]. Simple as for the number of diverse packages/systems involved. -- ᛊᚨᚾᛁᛏᚣ᛫ᛁᛊ᛫ᚠᛟᚱ᛫ᚦᛖ᛫ᚹᛖᚨᚲ
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