Re: My proposal for the libgcc runtime ABI (ia64 gcc/glibc is broken.)

[Phil Edwards <pedwards at disaster dot jaj dot com>]

> Jeffrey A Law <law@cygnus.com> writes:
> > Not necessarily.  One could certainly argue that if it's on the root
> > filesystem that it ought to be linked statically.
>
> Jeff, don't be ridiculous.  First, you should look at the reality.

Well... he is.  I speak as a system administrator now rather than a
developer; Jeff is quite correct in saying that this is an arguable point.
It is by no means ridiculous.

I've had Linux boxes crash hard, and IRIX boxes crash hard, and Solaris,
and Alphas; and Linux has been the only one ever that was a nightmare to
repair due to all the dynamic linking tangles.  Having root-partition
binaries be statically linked is /excellent/ preparation for problems.
Or even just for doing work in a /real/ single-user mode.


> I personally don't care a bit about all these issues.  I have no
> problem with recompiling my whole system since I use almost no program
> where this is not possible and for the few I cannot recompile I can
> find a way around this problem.

That's wonderful for Linux systems.  The rest of us beg (!) to differ.


> But you can be sure you'll have a few million other people on your
> rear end if you screw this up.  And not coming up with a solution soon
> will certainly be in this category.

Oh, we'll all be bitching at the GCC maintainers anyway even if they get it
all correct.  :-)  But I'd rather have a delayed, well-though-out solution
instead of a quick "this works perfectly for Linux, the rest of y'all are
screwed for another 18 months".

GCC is finally getting some /serious/ recognition on non-Linux platforms.
Even non-programmers have heard of it and recognize that it is a quality
compiler, but many of them still incorrectly think of it as "the Linux
compiler" because that's where the attention goes.  Please, folks, let's
not blow this now.


Phil