On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 10:32:56PM -0400, Alexandre Rostovtsev wrote: > On Wed, 2013-07-31 at 22:12 -0400, Rich Freeman wrote: > > Honestly, I don't think maintainers should be asked to justify > > features unless they're actually causing some kind of conflict. > > > > If Robin wants to support USE=static for lvm2, he can do so. If it > > somehow caused problems with other packages that would be a different > > matter, but I can't see how a static binary should hurt anything. If > > he wanted to drop dynamic linking support I'd also be concerned. > > However, maintainers should be free to support options even if some > > consider them a waste of time. > > > > If Robin wants to satisfy our idle curiosity he can do so, but let's > > not hound maintainers willing to do extra work unless they're actually > > causing problems. > > The problem is when that extra work results in a flag on virtual/udev > which cannot be satisfied by some of the virtual's implementations (like > systemd) and which then leads to several screen lengths of uninformative > portage errors facing users who are upgrading to gnome-3.8.
Another problem is that udev and kmod actively ban static linking. They, like systemd, use gcc symbol visibility, which is not fully supported in static libraries [1], and if you look at the wiki I refer to, one of the features they point out is that you don't have to worry about private symbols clashing any more in libraries because you can just hide them. If we want to continue supporting this, it will probably require custom patches to udev, and kmod. Then we will have to make sure none of that breaks systemd. I would be willing to bet that these patches probably would not be accepted upstream, so we would have to maintain them forever. If we are going to try to maintain something like that, which will affect multiple packages in base-system, I am just curious what the use case for it is, especially since multiple other distros do not support it. William [1] http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Visibility
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