> "DL libraries aren't really a different kind of library format (both > static and shared libraries can be used as DL libraries);"
Library archives (.a) and shared objects (.so) differ in several ways. Roughly speaking: >From a file format perspective, .a files are simple collections (man ar) of independent compiled objects, while .so files are complete libraries produced by the linker and contain additional information which tell the dynamic linker (ld.so) how to load and share the code. More importantly, code which is intended to be used in shared objects must be compiled with specific options as position-independent code, whereas code in an archive needs not. You can't link dynamically against a library archive, so all DL code on Linux must be compiled as a shared object, whether it's actually shared or not (think plugins). As for the static use-flag: don't use it, unless you have very good reasons to do so. It will result in a system with larger binaries and in many cases you will *not* get true statically-linked binaries (e.g. most of the things which link against glibc). As for dynamic linking breakage following upgrades, IMO portage and revdep-rebuild give good enough support for fixing that. andrea
