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On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 10:32:56PM -0400, Alexandre Rostovtsev wrote: |
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> On Wed, 2013-07-31 at 22:12 -0400, Rich Freeman wrote: |
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> > Honestly, I don't think maintainers should be asked to justify |
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> > features unless they're actually causing some kind of conflict. |
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> > |
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> > If Robin wants to support USE=static for lvm2, he can do so. If it |
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> > somehow caused problems with other packages that would be a different |
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> > matter, but I can't see how a static binary should hurt anything. If |
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> > he wanted to drop dynamic linking support I'd also be concerned. |
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> > However, maintainers should be free to support options even if some |
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> > consider them a waste of time. |
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> > |
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> > If Robin wants to satisfy our idle curiosity he can do so, but let's |
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> > not hound maintainers willing to do extra work unless they're actually |
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> > causing problems. |
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> |
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> The problem is when that extra work results in a flag on virtual/udev |
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> which cannot be satisfied by some of the virtual's implementations (like |
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> systemd) and which then leads to several screen lengths of uninformative |
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> portage errors facing users who are upgrading to gnome-3.8. |
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Another problem is that udev and kmod actively ban static linking. They, |
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like systemd, use gcc symbol visibility, which is not fully supported in |
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static libraries [1], and if you look at the wiki I refer to, one of the |
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features they point out is that you don't have to worry about private |
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symbols clashing any more in libraries because you can just hide them. |
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If we want to continue supporting this, it will probably require custom |
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patches to udev, and kmod. Then we will have to make sure none of that |
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breaks systemd. |
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I would be willing to bet that these patches probably would not be |
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accepted upstream, so we would have to maintain them forever. |
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If we are going to try to maintain something like that, which will |
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affect multiple packages in base-system, I am just curious what the use |
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case for it is, especially since multiple other distros do not support |
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it. |
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William |
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[1] http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Visibility |
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