On Tue, Sep 13, 2005, Ralf S. Engelschall wrote: > On Tue, Sep 13, 2005, Birger Krägelin wrote: > > > > So, the main argument against shared libraries is the support > > > of multiple instances, currently. > > > > What's the argument against static linking? > > Memory shouldn't be a problem anymore... > > Yes, neither HD nor RAM consumption is the real problem today (HD is > cheap and RAM is not consumed very much more thanks to smart enough VM > management in modern Unix flavors based on copy-on-write semantics, > etc).
Reminds me in a saying of some hardware guy: No matter how fast the hardware goes, the programmers are p*ssing it all away. Software becomes larger and more complex each day. Copy-on-write does not bring much, when a mega-library is statically linked into dozens of programs. And also in "forking" programs like apache it does not bring much, because when static linking is in effect, there is normally no position independent code generated. Memory is wasted and the necessary relocations and memory management overhead slows down loading. *But* that is not my main concern. > But one problem with static linking is that in case of security issues > (think "zlib" or the recent "pcre" issues) one is required to rebuild > lots of applications. Nothing one cannot handle, but it at least > requires lots of more efforts. > > The second issue (which I guess triggered Matthias here ;-) is that > sometimes (think "gtk" here) the static linking is rather hard to > achieve because the upstream authors sometimes seem to no longer test > it at all and we are required to hack their code a lot. With a shared > library approach we could avoid this hacking. Yes. I want to *move on*. I do not want to waste my time to hack and build software in a "non standard" way. And i'm afraid that there is some danger that we drift slowly but continuously away from the main stream. Yesterday i thought it would be a nice idea to try the latest version of binutils, to see whether there are still problems to build mozilla. Well, it does not build under Solaris, because "--disable-nls" was added to the configure parameters... I'll send patches this evening. For now i do not want to provoke immediate action. I just want to fully understand why things are like they are and whether the facts that led to some decisions are still valid. Until now i did not hear about real showstoppers. I think only very old software will have problems. Especially all the stuff that uses the GNU autotools should just work. Also, it is probably not necessary to convert all and everything immediately. My main interest is the whole Gnome stuff. (mk) -- Matthias Kurz; Fuldastr. 3; D-28199 Bremen; VOICE +49 421 53 600 47 >> Im prämotorischen Cortex kann jeder ein Held sein. (bdw) << ______________________________________________________________________ The OpenPKG Project www.openpkg.org Developer Communication List openpkg-dev@openpkg.org
