On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 12:57 PM, Ian Lance Taylor <i...@google.com> wrote: > > Jakub Jelinek <ja...@redhat.com> writes: > > >> -static option? and 3) Is there a way to fix them? I've even gone so > >> far as to manually run collect2 specifying my own hand edited command > >> line, but nothing I've tried there has worked either. > > > > Don't link statically, there are many reasons not to and only very few > > reasons for it (primarily exception is some system recovery tools that are > > supposed to work even when shared libraries are hosed). > > See http://people.redhat.com/drepper/no_static_linking.html > > The main reason to link statically is the inverse of Ulrich's first > reason to link dynamically: if you link dynamically, your program is > vulnerable to changes in the shared libraries. If your program is > carefully tuned and tested, then changes to shared libraries can > introduce unexpected performance changes, or even, in the worst case, > unexpected bugs. Another way to say "by fixing a dynamic library you > can fix a bug in every program in one place" is "by distributing a new > dynamic library, you can break every program at once." > > I think the argument against static linking does not consider the world > where one builds a carefully tuned executable and then runs it for many > years. In that environment, each change to a dynamic library requires > careful retesting of all the affected programs. But it does not follow > that we never want to change the library, because not all programs are > performance sensitive, and new programs require new features. > > Ian
There's also much less to deal with from a Q/A and tech support perspective if you use static linking with a closed source application, since you can produce 1 binary which works across multiple distributions and kernels without the user compiling it, which is what I'm dealing with. Not necessarily enough to mandate linking everything statically, I actually have been advocating for a while to link everything dynamically. But it is how it is for now, and I suspect it will take more nagging and more time for there to be a real switch
