On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 06:11:21PM +0200, Jakub Jelinek wrote:
On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 05:06:20PM +0100, Robert Spanton wrote:
> I've recently had to link a fair amount of my work statically so that
> it'll run on a cluster of RHEL machines. Unfortunately, I am just a
> user of these machines, and so I don't have the power to get them to run
> Fedora or even to get the admins to install RHEL packages in a timely
> manner. Building statically also helps me to eliminate as many of the
> inevitable fractional differences between cluster nodes as possible, to
> achieve reproducible results from simulation runs.
>
> However, only a few packages in Fedora provide -static variants. This
> has meant that I've had to locally build these, which is obviously not
> desirable from a maintenance perspective.
>
> So, would be acceptable to register requests for -static package
> variants as tickets on bugzilla? Or is there a better way to try to
> encourage people to generate these packages?
Better yet is not to link statically.
http://www.akkadia.org/drepper/no_static_linking.html
There are times when static linking is a useful. Robert clearly
describes one in his original post. I also use static linking as a
way to distribute binaries that will run on a range of Linux
distros[*].
Uli's claim that static linking's benefits "never been the case and
never will be the case" is complete drivel IMHO.
Rich.
[*] In fact, I wrote a nice little script to help:
http://git.annexia.org/?p=libguestfs.git;a=blob;f=relink-static.sh;hb=HEAD
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat
http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines. Tiny program with many
powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top