Mark Hindess said the following on 16.06.2008 11:10:
I think we should stop linking static lib{png,jpeg,lcms} on linux 32-bit (and any ports that also use this by default). We link these dynamically on linux/x86_64 and if it is good enough for that platform I don't see why it wouldn't be good enough for any other platforms. The APIs for all three libraries are very stable and making the dependencies consistent would help simplify the depends.xml.Furthermore, I'd be tempted to by-pass the symlinking process altogether and just checking that the headers/libraries are available at depends.xml time and then link against them directly with -lpng etc. Comments?
It was Geir who insisted on static linking. He said that for certification it is necessary to have a binary with all of its dependencies inside of it. I don't know if it is true, but Sun seems to be using static libraries...
On x86 Linux it is usually possible to create a shared library and link it against a static library that was not built with -fPIC. But on x86_64 static library that wasn't built with -fPIC cannot be linked to a shared library. Also not all of the distros provide static versions of libraries at all and none of them provide static libraries that are built with -fPIC option. That is why we use dynamic ones for classlib dependencies.
-- Gregory
