Skip this message if you're not interested in Stali Linux concepts and static linking in general. Apologies for my poor writing skills in English.
BACKGROUND I'll not write about advantages and disadvantages of static linking, you can find informations about that on Stali web page. Moreover creating small statically linked distro has been proved to possible by Bifrost Linux (check older messages on mailing list). Personally I have been interested in using existing package/ports-like system for creating static binaries. Burden of tracking dependencies for everything beside basic and small software is huge. I picked up Pkgsrc for many reasons (I'll skip that to keep message shorter) and will describe what I found. I'm sending this message, because there was some interest on #suckless IRC channel (at least I think so). FORCING STATIC LINKING Bifrost Linux has simple framework for building packages. Packages are compiled inside chrooted environment using old images provided by uClibc project. This approach has some advantages, because you don't pollute your working distribution (compared to chrooted one) with libraries. Bifrost build framework uses simple shell scripts to detect options for static linking (grep ./configure --help for --enable-static and so on). That works pretty well for small packages, but in Pkgsrc case it means that some big changes are needed. As I mentioned chroot images provided by uClibc project are very outdated. I found that similar chroot images are provided by Aboriginal Linux, distribution maintained by Rob Landley. Rob provided simpler solution for forcing static linking, by removing all shared libraries (this can be done safely in Aboriginal, because binaries are already statically linked): # find / -name "*.so*" | xargs rm As it turns out in that kind environment, you don't need special options for configure part of build. Most configure scripts are complex enough to figure out without help that only static binaries are to be built. LIBTOOL It also simplifies other things. Libtool has some issues with static linking, mainly --static option isn't working as supposed. Bifrost build framework uses some wrappers to change --static to --all-static, just to fix libtool. In case with shared libraries removed, this isn't problem at all, libtool can be compiled without support for shared libraries (--disable-shared and remove /bin/shlibtool). I used libtool this way without problems. OTHER ISSUES Of course there are some other issues, when only static libraries are available. Some software still needs additional configure options or other steps. LDFLAGS+="-z muldefs" is your friend, especially when it comes to bigger pieces of software. This flag forces linker to pick up one of multiple definitions. PYTHON By far Python required most work to build static binaries (I don't have any plans for Python, beside using it as build dependency - it is common). Python build system work more or less like this: first interpreter with builtin modules specified in Modules/Setup.dist is compiled, then setup.py is launched and default modules (dynamic loading) are build, beside those specified earlier in Setup.dist. So I ended up adding every module picked up by setup.py to Setup.dist. It turns out that sample Setup.dist is missing some modules, so it wasn't the case of just uncommenting everything. Moreover magic option DYNLOADFILE="dynload_stub.o" is needed for configure part, otherwise you will end up with segfaulting Python. PKG-CONFIG Another trouble maker is pkg-config, dependencies for shared and static linking are specified separately. You can find Requires/Requires.private and Libs/Libs.private in *.pc files. The problem is that I'm not aware of any clean solution (environment variable etc) to force pkg-config to pickup private parts of *.pc files. I don't line idea of patching every makefile, since most Xorg apps are using pkg-config. I ended up with wrapper: | mv pkg-config pkg-config.old | | cat > pkg-config << 'EOF' | #!/bin/sh | | pkg-config.old --static "$@" | EOF If someone knows better solution, I would like to hear about it. Anyway this works just fine in cases I encountered so far. Still I'm not sure about pkg-config m4 macros, which can be used by autoconf. Some fixes to *.pc files were also needed e.g. missing "-ldl". PKGSRC, ABORIGINAL SPECIFIC ISSUES Pkgsrc uses static package lists: file PLIST. This means that in some cases PLIST cleanups are needed (mainly removing *.so files), but that didn't happen often to be huge issue. As for Aboriginal Linux, main problems are related to cpp (C pre processor). I hope that this will be fixed in next release, because I patched a dozen of configure scripts (only direct use case of cpp I can think of) to work around this problem. Of course uClibc creates issues of it's own, but this is getting better - uClibc matures and software is patched upstream (my memory can be false when it comes to this, I used uClibc for first time 2 years ago). RESULTS I compiled almost whole Xorg (statically linked) from pkgsrc. Only missing part is xkeyboard-config, which depends on intltool. Intltool requires XML Parser module for Perl. I used static build of Perl, so dynamic module can't be loaded. I'll look into this later (compiling in XML Parser into Perl binary). As for bigger parts I also have static build of Perl and Python mentioned earlier. Here are some stats about biggest binaries: | 6.8M python2.6 | 6.3M perl | 3.7M xterm | 2.6M Xorg I didn't test yet if Xorg is working, because GPL-terrorists took down ttylinux (small Linux distro I planed to use). Bifrost Linux doesn't provide needed drivers/modules to launch X11 and I'm not in the mood to compile kernel right now. SUMMARY Maybe use of Pkgsrc is questionable, but that is for separate discussion. My main goal was to research possibility of using static linking on larger scale. Building Xorg was first step in my opinion. Informations about what I've been doing can be found on wiki [1], some parts are redundant or lacking explanations. I'll probably setup repository with fixes to Pkgsrc in future. Finally some thoughts about static linking (I'll skip what has been said already by others): - no symlink hell in /usr/lib (just *.a files without version number suffixes as in shared libraries) - number of libraries dropped down - some packages e.g. openssl are using internal shared libraries (I know this, because of static PLISTs) [1] https://github.com/blinkkin/blinkkin.github.com/wiki/Aboriginal-Pkgsrc
