Re: get rid static libraries or fix them

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

On Wed, 2007-02-07 at 18:31 +0100, Stanislav Brabec wrote:
> Hallo.
> 
> I have just got a bug report saying, that static instances of GNOME
> libraries are not useful. I wanted to oppose, so I have tried to link
> gnome-hello statically.
> 
> It failed and I have discovered many bugs. It seems, that nobody ever
> tried to use static libraries, otherwise these bugs would be discovered
> many years ago.
> 
> So we should find all lower mentioned (and probably many unmentioned)
> static issues and fix them or we should disable static libraries for the
> whole platform. In current state, it's only a waste of disk space.

Hi,
   Currently I dont see anything wrong with the state of affairs at all.

Just because you havent built gnome-keyring or gtk+ statically, doesnt
mean that you cant compile them statically and use them statically,
the fact that they are not distributed statically is not a bug, just
an inconvenience for people who happen to want to link statically
that day, and a convenience for people who dont need static libraries
installed and would preffer a little extra disk space instead.

FYI, I've sucessfully built static binaries that link against static
gtk+, if modules must be opened via dlopen, that is another issue - 
you still get a statically linked program that searches for modules
and loads them with dlopen.

For consistancy, maybe more libraries shouldnt build/install static
versions of thier libraries by default, as you say its a waste of 
disk space, OTOH that doesnt mean people cant link statically to
the gnome platform, only that they must compile a static version
first.

Cheers,
                   -Tristan