Re: Unfortunate dynamic linking for everything

From: Richard Coleman <richardcoleman_at_mindspring.com>
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 21:41:51 -0500
Dan Nelson wrote:

> In the last episode (Nov 19), Richard Coleman said:
> 
>>I don't really care whether everything is statically or dynamically 
>>linked.  With the fast machines and huge disks these days, bloat is not 
>>much of an issue.  But nss and pam need to work correctly.  If the folks 
>>that are against dynamic linking have an alternate method to make this 
>>work, I'm all for it.  But it needs to be more than theory.  We need code.
>>
>>To be honest, I've never understood the (seemingly irrational) 
>>resistance against this change.  Solaris made this change 10 years ago.
> 
> 
> Not completely:
> 
> $ uname -a
> SunOS pd1 5.9 Generic_112233-08 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-Enterprise
> $ file /bin/sh
> /sbin/sh:       ELF 32-bit MSB executable SPARC Version 1, statically linked, stripped
> $ file /sbin/* | grep statically | cut -d: -f1 | fmt
> /sbin/autopush /sbin/fdisk /sbin/jsh /sbin/mount /sbin/sh
> /sbin/soconfig /sbin/sync /sbin/umount /sbin/uname

I have no problem with FreeBSD doing something similar and leaving a few 
binaries static.  I think most of the resistance to that was due to the 
increased complexity of the build system.

It seems /bin/sh is the real sticking point.  But if the compromise is 
to statically link /bin/sh, that would be cool with me.  Other than 
tilde expansion not working when using nss_ldap, I can't think of any 
other problems.  I consider that a minor blemish I could easily live 
with.  Normal users will not generally have /bin/sh has their shell 
anyways.  And I could always compile a dynamically linked version into 
/usr/bin if necessary.

To be honest, 98% of the time that someone notices brokeness due to 
nss_ldap, it comes when using /bin/ls.

Richard Coleman
richardcoleman_at_mindspring.com
Received on Wed Nov 19 2003 - 17:44:43 UTC

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