Compiling "static" applications with SWT/GTK

[Ranjit Mathew]

Andrew Haley wrote:
> 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.

You're probably talking of "zlib", right?

See, I don't (and hopefully neither does Steve) deny
that technically dynamic libraries are way better than
static libraries when versioning is implemented properly.

However, the problem is *usability* as pointed out
earlier. It is also not helped by:

> 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.

Hey, I agree in toto with you technically, but
do try to see the usability hurdle that the
current situation imposes on the potential users
of a small-time developer.

Ranjit.

-- 
Ranjit Mathew          Email: rmathew AT hotmail DOT com

Bangalore, INDIA.      Web: http://ranjitmathew.tripod.com/