Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2021 20:29:44 +0100
To: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: RFC on -static subpackages and being more static-linking
 friendly
From: =?UTF-8?Q?S=C3=B6ren?= Tempel <soeren@soeren-tempel.net>
References: <d0c4cab578c513f312390679680eb1cf31690a05.camel@gmail.com>
 <20210119212733.11bcc69b@ncopa-desktop.lan>
In-Reply-To: <20210119212733.11bcc69b@ncopa-desktop.lan>
Message-Id: <3ABSHLGZFBV87.3CAQP0TW1HIKI@8pit.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Hi,

Natanael Copa <ncopa@alpinelinux.org> wrote:
> My thinking is that we don't really support static linking for our own
> packages. We should always use dynamic linking, with a few exceptions.
> (like qemu user). But we can provide -static when requested and it does
> not cost us much.

I agree that we don't need to support static linking for our own
packages. However, I think many people rely on us providing static
libraries. I have seen quite a few Docker images using Alpine to build
statically linked versions of OSS software. From the top of my head, the
vis text editor uses Alpine for this purpose [1].

I also have quite a bit of software lying around which I link statically
on Alpine in order to be able to use recent versions of it on ancient
non-Alpine server systems (shells, text editors, =E2=80=A6).

> I think we should use --disable-static as the default, and enable
> static on request. We shouldn't use the static library ourselves (with
> a few exceptions), but can make it available when someone asks for it.

I think we should support static linking of packaged
libraries for the use cases outlined above. Also consider that musl has
some obvious advantage over glibc in regards to static linking, thereby
making Alpine a very decent choice for these use cases.

Greetings,
S=C3=B6ren

[1]: https://github.com/martanne/vis/blob/master/Dockerfile