> IMHO, if you are building your own numerical crunching apps, then you > probably would be better off controlling all aspects of building each > static portion of it. This means writing your own scripts and tuning > compile flags of portions of the app to maximize performance. This may > also mean applying your own patches that may be unsuitable for a more > general purpose distribution. This is not my use. I just do numerical models, and I don't care that much about speed. But I need some functions provided by libraries (lapack for linear algebra, fftw for fourier transforms, and general purpose math libs like gsl or the cernlib for other utilities). I don't want to customize them, just use them. > If you rely on a distribution's static libraries, then there is no > guarantee in the future that those static libs will remain unchanged in > API, so if you ever need to rebuild your app with a tiny change you > could be affected by far more than the change that you expected. Indeed in case of heavy customization having static libs from fedora may be unneeded, as you said, if a given version is needed or static libs are tweaked. But this is not the use I have for math libs. All in all this is another case than mine (not that it doesn't exist, though). In my case I can rebuild when there is an api change, I don't want to use a given version, I really don't want to mess with those libs internals nor compile settings. But I want to generate an executable that I can run on any linux distribution and rerun later, without the burden to have to bundle shared libs with my executable. I understand that my need may be particular. It is possible that the benefit from being able to have a portable executable statically compiled against libs is outweight by the cost in term of space wasted by static libraries. But if static libs are excluded it must be for that reason, not because static libs are intrinsically bad, as I hope my personnal use show that it is untrue. And not that I don't advocate to keep all the static libs, but those that can be used in contexts where security is not an issue. This includes low level libraries (glibc, libstdc++...) math libs, plotting libs, and maybe others, but no network libs or pure desktop stuff. -- Pat -- fedora-extras-list mailing list fedora-extras-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-extras-list
