Static linking considered harmful

[Patrice Dumas]

On Wed, Nov 22, 2006 at 11:32:09PM -0800, Ulrich Drepper wrote:
> Florian La Roche wrote:
> >Then we should not remove too many static libs. Some are good candidates
> >to only keep the real core (LSB?) libs dynamically loaded.
> 
> Why?  This makes no sense.  You have to provide arguments for each .a 
> file.  As I said, you cannot even build a graphical application without 

This is too much work for the maintainers. The issue of static linking
should be considered, but asking the packagers to do so much investigation
work seems too much to me. It could be a should item, especially if there
is a clear documentation on what to search for, but for a must it is too
demanding in my opinoin. Static libraries are already discouraged in the
guidelines.

Does the fact that an application is linked with libdl means that it 
is useless if linked statically, or is it possible that some features
only are unavailable?

--
Pat