91–100 of 169 posts
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I would be surprised if there was not a way to take a dynamic executable, "add in" all the required libraries, and return a fat static executable
If you know of such a utility I'd like to see it, because I've looked and never found it. The closest I've seen are things like AppImage.
Would be cool to get a bit of a "why this matters" intro on repos like this. I clicked through the details, but left wondering if I have any potential use for this. Can I compile this onto a USB stick and use it as a throw-away boot Linux for maintenance tasks? Can I cross-compile this for embedded devices? What is the statically-linked advantage here? Not trying to minimize the effort, I would actually love to see m…
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If you know of such a utility I'd like to see it, because I've looked and never found it. The closest I've seen are things like AppImage.
I have used exodus to do this in the past. https://github.com/intoli/exodus
That isn't really what is being described, or at least not what I'm referring to. It's more like a self-extractor.
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As someone who uses linux casually, I often experience pain when I download a program, try to run it, and it fails because some dependency is not installed or is not the right version. So you try to figure out how to install it and it in turn needs a couple of things. All of this works fine if whatever package manager your distro uses has the program you want, but the package managers don't have evertying! So I'd lov…
> So I'd love an ecosystem where things tend to be statically linked unless there is a good reason not to. Well, every time there is a bug fix in one of your dependencies you/your distribution would have to recompile everything that depends on it. Which will use quite some resources. So to actually use this you would have to reinstall (nearly) all programs once a week or so (no matter if source or binary distribution…
No other environment forces this kind of complexity on their users and almost no non-enthusiast user wants to deal with this structure.
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I am not sure what you mean. The Linux kernel has dynamically loaded modules but you can build modules as statically part of the kernel. 'Y' instead of 'M' in the config. It doesn't make sense to "statically link" a kernel to a program, or multiple programs together, which I read your comment to suggest. That would be a different thing than the term "statically link" refers to.
> It doesn't make sense to "statically link" a kernel to a program That's kinda what a Unikernel is.
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>Well, every time there is a bug fix in one of your dependencies you/your distribution would have to recompile everything that depends on it Well no, I could opt not to apply the bug fix if it isn't affecting me. This again is sort of serve mentality, where of course you want to get a bug fix in as quick as possible in case it is a security issue. A desktop user, maybe you don't. >After all, even nowadays application…
> Probably suggest arch linux to someone complaining about having to track down dependencies does not make sense, since such a person is more interested in the OS just working rather than making the OS a bit of a hobby that that they want to customize. Then recommend Manjaro, not an OS that “just” loads them down with ads, tracking, forced updates, and more unless — and to some extent still even after — they customiz…
Pop has broken itself less often then Windows for me, while Manjaro has broken itself slightly more.
> No package manager. > Instead, you configure a set of specifications of what files from which packages to include on your system Isn't that a just a declarative package manager?
My main point here is that once you build the system, there is no longer any notion of "package", just files that make up your root filesystem. There is no package database tracking which files came from which packages. Instead, if you want to add/remove/update a package, you rebuild the system with a different specification, and then sync the resulting tree it to /.
Arcan would be interesting on this, too.
Honestly, I'm team dynamic linking. I prefer to have things clearly separated in functionality and easily upgradeable. Statically linking all the OS utilities to their dependency libraries, over and over again? Dear god that sounds awful.
There's no reason that there needs to be such extremes as either all statically linked or all dynamically linked. History has proven that dynamic linking causes a large number of headaches, and static linking has drawbacks as well. There is a reasonable middle ground: base system functionality that is utilized by most software (stdlib, cryptography, networking, gui, etc) should be dynamic and everything else should b…