Slightly off-topic: statically linking

Posted Aug 4, 2011 8:12 UTC (Thu) by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
Parent article: Getting a better Glimpse at unstable applications

I know it doesn't answer all of the issues addressed by Glimpse, but wouldn't it make sense to provide alpha software for testing as statically linked binaries? Then you don't have to worry about version differences, and even targeting several distributions with one binary becomes more realistic. And the security side (one or two libraries not being quite up-to-date with security fixes) is presumably less important for alpha versions - even apart from the fact that they probably need frequent rebuilds anyway.

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Slightly off-topic: statically linking

Posted Aug 4, 2011 8:19 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (2 responses)

Isn't there a tool which takes a dynamically linked executable and a bunch of libraries, and spits out a big statically linked blob?

Slightly off-topic: statically linking

Posted Aug 4, 2011 8:24 UTC (Thu) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

> Isn't there a tool which takes a dynamically linked executable and a bunch of libraries, and spits out a big statically linked blob?

That would probably be quite a bit bigger than a properly done statically linked binary though - in theory at least; I suspect that most libraries on a typical Linux-based system are probably not at all optimised for static linking.

Slightly off-topic: statically linking

Posted Aug 5, 2011 16:48 UTC (Fri) by jsanders (subscriber, #69784) [Link]

pyinstaller does something like this for python applications, allowing you to distribute a tarball of the executable plus libraries which the user can unpack into a single directory. I use it to distribute my PyQt-based plotting application Veusz.