On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 11:18:43PM -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
Axel Thimm (Axel.Thimm(a)ATrpms.net) said:
> > All I'm saying is that we shouldn't continue to support this sort of
> > fundamentally-unsupportable setup ad nauseam - it's time to think about
> > how to solve this in a sane manner, rather than continuing to paper
> > over the problem. I don't see how, at a minium, moving the static
> > libraries to -static packages changes things - if, as you say, everyone
> > just chucks libraries manually in /usr/local, then how is this making
> > anything worse for them?
>
> No problem at all with moving away static libs into their subpackage!
> But the thread went on to claim that static libs are not useful in
> general, and some people including myself just showed the typical use
> cases where it makes very much sense to have static libs around.
They aren't useful *in general*.
When I wrote that the claim is false that they are not useful in
general, I didn't mean that "they are always useful", the opposite is
that "there are many cases where statically linking makes very much
sense".
It's supporting an outmoded, inefficient mode of use (shuffling
libraries and binaries around between machines and OSes), and it's
no different than various other outmoded, inefficient, past
UNIX-isms. We don't support every app parsing the password file (or
more) - we support authenticating via PAM. We don't support making
cdrecord setuid - we support fixing the kernel to DTRT. We don't
encourage logging in as root to do all tasks - we support
consolehelper, and moving to things like consolekit and separated
helpers from their UI frontends. We don't support creating specific
groups to own devices - we support pam_console and then ACLs added
via ConsoleKit.
IMHO you're comapring apples and organges. Statically linking has
nothing to do with being modern or outmoded, we're not in the fashion
business ;)
Statically linking means to closely (and efficiently!) bundle all bits
that are needed to run together at a given time. No worries if your
update of the gsl of lapack will influence the numerical precision duo
to ieee746 shortcuts, no worries if the other machine has a different
set of runtime libs (like missing some). That has nothing to do with
modernism.
We don't support every single usage case that people want in
Fedora
Sure, that's why I asked previously in this thread whether the
scientifc gorups are considered worth supporting or not.
- it's about trying to solve the problems in the right ways that
scale going forward.
The moment you present a better alternative than statically linking
people will listen.
--
Axel.Thimm at
ATrpms.net