[clug] VMware ThinApps: anything like this in the FOSS/Linux world?

[Brad Hards]

On Saturday 30 April 2011 19:24:02 Robert Brockway wrote:
> > All of that just to have dynamically linked executables?  Perhaps we've
> > gone too far along that road and a mix of dynamic and static would be
> > better?
I agree it would help with some particular usage patterns. For many purposes, 
it might be worse though. For example, startup latency can be better by not 
having all those relocations, but if you have a set of libraries pre-loaded, 
then things might be faster with dynamic linking to those libraries. I'd be 
interested to see some test results.

> At the risk of making a "me too" post, I've been thinking along these
> lines for a while.  With gobs of disk and memory maybe I'd be better off
> with everything statically linked.  Disk space (and even memory) can be
> saved with the right kind of deduping.
There is a downside to this - you need to upgrade everything any time you 
change an underlying library. For example, prior to the poppler library, 
several free software libraries embedded (statically linked) a copy of xpdf. 
Whenever someone found a security bug in xpdf, everyone had to figure out the 
fix for their code, relink, and release an upgrade. Sometimes it took quite a 
while. Now we all use poppler, only it needs to be upgraded - okular, evince 
and others don't need to make any change (not even a recompile if you're 
careful about binary compatibility).

Brad