Re: Stop shipping static libraries for NetBSD

["Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc." <woods%planix.ca@localhost>]

On 17-Aug-08, at 1:52 AM, der Mouse wrote:
> (a) It also offers the ability to change a library without needing to
> relink everything that uses it.  The most dramatic example of this
> would probably be a bugfix in libc.

Yes, that can be considered a benefit for sure.

However in my experience it's not a very big benefit, especially when  
one can rebuild everything from source, and redistribute it to  
production platforms, with relatively little delay and with secure,  
well tested, and easily automated mechanisms.  (there are many ways  
this can be done and the choice between them varies very much with the  
exact requirements of a given environment or application, and  
sometimes yes, the devil is in the details)

However there are at least a couple of other technologies which can  
achieve similar or even identical benefits without requiring one to  
submit to the overheads, complexity, and dangers of the current form  
of dynamic libraries.  The most obvious of course are the old UNIX  
System V style shared libraries.  They similarly also provide  
significant savings of disk and memory space while still maintaining  
much of the security and software hygiene benefits of static linking;  
and furthermore they do not have nearly as much runtime overhead as  
the currently used technology suffers from.  Of course a suitable  
implementation does not presently exist in open source form suitable  
for use in NetBSD, at least not as far as I'm aware.

--
                                        Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
                                        <woods%planix.ca@localhost>