On Mon, Mar 22, 2004 at 08:54:17PM +0000, Roger Leigh wrote: > I used a statically-linked binary just a few days ago. I needed to > resize an NTFS partition on a newly-delivered system which came with > Windows XP. In the event, I was able to get a statically linked > binary, copy it onto a floppy and run this after booting from a rescue > disk.
It should be much simpler and faster to copy the existing binary and its shared library dependencies from a running system than to recompile the program from source. It would probably be larger, so you might need to compress it to fit onto a floppy, but it still seems easier. If you need more than a "quick fix", a rescue CD is the way to go, as others have mentioned. > It's also useful when you want to provide something that "just work" with > no extra dependencies. While proprietary/commercial software was the > biggest user of this, it's also useful for free software. What if Joe > Average would like to run my program which makes use of libstdc++, GTK+ > 2.2 and GNOME 2.4? It's the least hassle way to achieve this. The Debian packaging system is another way to accomplish the same goal (among other things), and I find it preferable to static linking. :-) > On a related note, I'd also be very happy if it was a requirement to > build libraries with a miniumum of "-g -ggdb -gdwarf-2", and not strip > them. We could provide some mechanism to automatically strip > binaries, surely? We can do better than that. See dh_strip --dbg-package=. -- - mdz
