Static linking considered harmful

Dmitry Butskoy buc at odusz.so-cdu.ru
Wed Nov 22 13:47:04 UTC 2006


Jakub Jelinek wrote:

>Removing libc.a would be most effective, but I'm afraid we still need
>a handful of statically linked binaries for boot time initialization and
>system recovery utilities.
>
>So, I think it would be best if we could analyze what in FC7/FE7
>is linked statically,
>
Just FYI, what was linked statically in FC5 (as an example ;) ):

Package		File

cryptsetup-luks /sbin/cryptsetup
device-mapper   /sbin/dmsetup.static
dmraid          /sbin/dmraid.static
dump            /sbin/dump
dump            /sbin/restore
e2fsprogs       /sbin/e2fsck
e2fsprogs       /sbin/fsck.ext2
e2fsprogs       /sbin/fsck.ext3
glibc           /sbin/ldconfig
glibc           /sbin/sln
libgcc          /usr/sbin/libgcc_post_upgrade
lvm2            /sbin/lvm.static
mkinitrd        /sbin/nash
module-init-tools       /sbin/insmod.static
rmt             /sbin/rmt
udev            /sbin/udevd.static

>  
>
> Thoughts?
>
I am sure that at least "libc.a/libm.a" must be saved. Certainly as a 
separate package (say "glibc-static"), not installed by default.

If some (advanced) user want to link something statically for some 
reason, let's give him a chance to do this easier. "Easier" means that 
he does not need to re-compile all the stuff he need. Just some 
libraries, but not the whole libc.

And if I teach programming, I want to show students that their "Hello, 
World!" program can be linked statically, and what it differs to dynamic 
linkage. For this, I want the libc.a to be present... ;)


Dmitry Butskoy
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/DmitryButskoy




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