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

[Robert Brockway]

On Sat, 30 Apr 2011, Brad Hards wrote:

> 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.

Hmm good point.  The difference may not be huge though.

>> 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

Ok, that's a very good argument.   Probably the best I've seen in 
favour of dynanmic libs.

Cheers,

Rob

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