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Re: Dynamically linking against GMP and MPFR
On Fri, May 25, 2007 at 05:37:49PM +0200, Eric Botcazou wrote:
> > I honestly don't know how to answer this question. Bootstrapping is an
> > unrelated problem, and the compiler is not a vital runtime component
> > of the system, so its dependencies do not need to be exceptionally
> > robust in the way that glibc's or even libstdc++'s do.
>
> A compiler is a "second order" thing though: its ill behaviour sends ripples
> through all the stuff it compiles. Suppose that an MPFR upgrade introduces a
> bug in the library and that the compiler is affected; every single program
> compiled from now on will be potentially affected by the MPFR bug, even if it
> has nothing to do with MPFR.
That just means that it's an application you care about. And now an
upgrade of MPFR which fixes bugs will require you to rebuild the
compiler.
We could go around this in circles forever; I think that the tradeoffs
are exactly the same as for any other application on your system, both
pro and con.
I'm not going to complain if someone makes a configure switch to
prefer static versions. We (CodeSourcery) are almost certainly going
to ship compilers statically linked to MPFR / GMP; we already have
machinery to build them that way. On the other hand I am positive
Debian will not ship its system compiler that way; Debian policy is
quite clear on this, dynamic libraries should always be used.
--
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery