Re: building boost statically

[Matt Benjamin <mbenjamin@redhat.com>]

Hi,

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Sage Weil" <sage@newdream.net>
> To: ceph-devel@vger.kernel.org
> Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2016 7:14:15 PM
> Subject: Re: building boost statically
> 
> On Thu, 28 Apr 2016, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 06:47:55PM -0400,  Sage Weil wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > > 
> > > We'd really like to use the latest boost, mainly so that we can use
> > > small_vector in a zillion places and avoid extra memory allocations.  The
> > > distros, as always, are behind.
> >
> > From a distribution perspective, LESS static building is better, so this
> > proposal is a concern, but I do realize that the Gentoo/ArchLinux/CoreOS
> > perspective is very different than the Ubuntu LTS perspective.
> > 
> > What's the state of having a more-up-to-date Boost in things like Ubuntu
> > backports, so that you don't have the overhead of having to maintain
> > your own boost packages or statically link?
> >
> > If support for statically linking a newer Boost is brought it, please,
> > please keep dynamic boost builds as fully supported, for distributions
> > that can keep up to date. As a bonus, at some point in the future, when
> > the slower distributions catch up, you might be able to escape the
> > static again.
> 
> Yeah, having the option to either build statically or dynamically against
> an up-to-date distro is probably the right carrot/stick combination to
> incentivize the distros to move to a newer boost.

++

> 
> Being able to conditionally not use the new stuff (e.g., typedef
> small_vector<> back to vector<>) may or may not work well, depending on
> which new thing we're trying to use.

I wouldn't want to do that.

> 
> FWIW, we made the static -> dynamic transition with leveldb because the
> distros complained and it was nothing but sadness--so so many hours wasted
> chasing bugs in ancient distro versions of leveldb, and a huge matrix of
> version possibilities that made it difficult to reproduce user issues.  I
> can't tell if there was ever an instance where it actually gained us
> anything (e.g., security update in leveldb), but I kind of doubt it.

This reminds me--we seem to still have issues with distro leveldbs, rocksdbs and clang++.

Matt

> 
> sage
> --


-- 
Matt Benjamin
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