Compiling "static" applications with SWT/GTK

[Andrew Haley]

For what it's worth, in our experience the big killer with static
executables is security bug fixes.

When Linux secrity teams find a security hole in a shared library they
issue a patch against that library.  There was a nasty problem about a
year ago when a security hole was discovered in a library that was
statically linked into a bunch of applications.  It took a good while
to find and rebuild and distribute all those applications.  This alone
was quite enough to persuade people that static linking is a Bad
Thing.

At present we don't have binary compatibility between libgcj releases,
so this doesn't apply to us: we can't use the system libgcj anyway.
But once BC is done, we will get release-to-release compatibility.

Andrew.