Re: [Dar-support] Problems building dar_static

[Mihai M. <io...@io...>]

* On 7/18/19 12:11 PM, Mihai Moldovan wrote:
> Uh, they do. In either one of the libcurl4-{gnutls,nss,openssl}-dev packages on
> Debian/Ubuntu. Other distros should likewise provide it in other packages. I
> guess the OpenSSL variant is the default, so I'd use that.

To be more precise: distros don't ship static libraries *by default* in standard
packages. Most often they are part of -dev(el) packages, because static
libraries are only ever needed when building software, so it makes sense to
split them out and not install them by default. If not needing to build
software, they'd just take up precious space and bitrot around since they would
never be used. Some exceptions naturally exist, like Gentoo and other
source-based distributions, but at least Gentoo makes static libraries toggable
via a use flag that is usually turned off by default.


> Might be nitpicking, but even with that you'll into problems. I recently had to
> upgrade a kernel and started seeing a lot of binaries from CentOS 6 fail,
> because the VSYSCALL emulation was turned off by default and these binaries
> still use them. The static binary might run fine if it's not bundling a libc,
> but that's more or less just a guess. Users should be aware that even static
> binaries can problematic sometimes.

I.e., statically-linked binaries (sadly) are not programs that magically will
always continue to work on any more recent or older system you throw them on. If
the kernel/libc changed in incompatible ways (most notably seen when the version
gap is big), even those will fail to work. Sometimes more spectacularly,
sometimes less so.



Mihai