[ On Tuesday, November 5, 2002 at 01:00:45 (+0900), Bang Jun-Young wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: /rescue
>
> What dynamically linked binaries give is much more than
> smaller disk space.

What pray tell could those things possibly be?  Yes I know the various
reasons, but none I know of are really valid or necessary for an
open-source system, especially not one that when used in production
server environments is more in need of stability and performance than
flash and flexibility.

Eg. if you don't care about disk space then static linking doesn't hurt
those who have even semi-modern disk systems.

We have source (and a nicely working and integrated build system) so
static linking doesn't hurt those who need different options -- feature
sets can be chosen at build time by system integrators and even by
individual system administrators.  Only vendors of proprietary
binary-only distributions really need dynamic linking for flexibility,
and even then it's a poor excuse if they would care to trust users with
re-linkable objects.

If you care about startup performance (especially of smaller programs,
but also of large programs which link with many libraries) then static
linking is the easiest and most reliable way to achieve this goal, and
it really works, even/especially with really big libraries like X11.
Been there, done that, very happy with the results!

If you care about security then static linking is superior to run-time
dynamic loading of object code and in some cases also superior to having
all of a shared library in the address space of a running program which
uses only a small portion of that library, even if you have verified
exec or whatever.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;            <g.a.woods@ieee.org>;           <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>