[Fedora-packaging] paragraph on shipping static numerical libs

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sun, May 27, 2007 at 04:27:02PM +0100, Jonathan Underwood wrote:
> 
> I regard myself as falling into the niche of scientic/numerical
> programming. However, I see no advantage to myself being able to
> compile staticly linked binaries in the name of portability. It
> doesn't really gain much, and actually I have seen doing such things
> give rather bizarre results.

I have exactly the opposite experience. I have issues with g77/gfortran
incompatibilities, for example. Or missing libraries on platform I am
not administrator. Or libraries with different sonames. In what case did
you have bizarre results?

> Besides which, if you were to want to statically link a binary and
> send it to run elsewhere, Fedora isn't the platform to be doing it on.

Why not?

> If you're looking for that sort of portability, you should be using a
> consistent and reliable platform for the calculations, like RHEL.

What a bizarre suggestion. Fedora should be good for numerical models.
If fedora isn't good for that RHEL wont be either.

> The right fix here is to educate scientific programmers as to why
> statically linking in libraries doesn't actually get them what they
> want, and that it is broken.

I don't want to give false ideas, in many real life cases statically 
linking numerical models gave a binary that gave a similar result on all
the platforms. I prefer educating people that believe that static
linking doesn't bring in portability.

--
Pat