Re: ar "zero" flag

[der Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>>> [drop static linking]
>> That'd be a sad day for everyone, but especially those interested in
>> security, simplicity, elegance, software hygiene, predictability,
>> performance, and, most of all, embedded systems.

Wow, I find myself in full agreement with gwoods.  Mark the calendar!

> If you want to go through the pain and hassle of all that crap
> yourself,

What pain and hassle?

Okay, software hygiene is a bit of a hassle, but not half so much
hassle as the mess that soon results when it's ignored.

> feel free to build the OS from source (and turn on whatever switch we
> use to enable building / installing the archive libraries).

That would be a reasonable answer if you were also specifically
proposing to continue to maintain that potential.  My experience with
NetBSD abandoning other things makes me pessimistic that it will
continue to even _exist_, never mind actually _work_, for more than
about two releases after someone proposes to drop sun2 in order to get
rid of that ugly static-link stuff entirely.

> However, I'm perfectly OK with saying "if you do this, we don't jump
> through hoops to make sure stuff like PAM works".

PAM is a good example of the problem side of dynamic linking.  The last
thing I want is for my security-critical infrastructure programs to go
deciding - at run time - to load run code that might not even have
existed when they were checked and built.  (Not that this couldn't be
done without dynamic linking, but it would be substantially harder.  I
see this as an example of "ooo, cool new facility, let's see where we
can create a problem to which it's a solution" without putting real
thought into whether the result is a sane place to use it.  (Hmm, it's
been a version or two since I checked; I should go make sure PAM is
disabled in my source trees....))

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