Re: [PATCH] util-linux: Remove static libraries from -dev packages

[Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Wed, 2012-09-26 at 10:28 +0100, Phil Blundell wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-09-26 at 09:49 +0100, Richard Purdie wrote:
> > On Tue, 2012-09-25 at 18:11 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2012-09-25 at 23:00 +0100, Phil Blundell wrote:
> > > 
> > > > That'd be inconsistent with other packages, since we do generally build
> > > > and ship the static libraries.  Having a big switch to turn off static
> > > > libraries globally seems like a fine plan, but I can't see any obvious
> > > > reason why the util-linux ones are any more useless than the rest.
> > > 
> > > Makes sense.  I wonder if there are actually any users of the static
> > > libraries.
> > > 
> > > For what it's worth in gnome-ostree I do just globally pass
> > > --disable-static by default.
> > 
> > I tested this a while back to see what performance difference it made.
> > The answer was "nothing too significant", I don't have the exact timings
> > handy. I do remember having to exclude sqlite-native from the list since
> > pseudo static links against it.
> 
> It's slightly surprising that it doesn't make that much of a difference,
> given that building static libraries does essentially double the number
> of compilations for library code.  Though, of course, glibc doesn't
> support --disable-static nowadays and there might be a few other big
> packages that have the same issue.
> 
> I guess that if you have enough cores, compilation count becomes
> something of a non-issue since it's one of the few things that does
> parallelize very well.  It might be interesting to repeat the
> measurements of --disable-static on a machine with only a few CPUs and
> see whether it makes more of a difference there.

Yes, admittedly I probably did test that in a highly parallel
environment and was focusing on the critical path timings as a result.

> Out of interest, why does pseudo static-link against sqlite anyway?

Given the crazy things that pseudo does and the way it works as an ld
preload that keeps itself preloaded, I'm guessing it stops itself having
to worry about finding its own libraries correctly. I just added a
package override for sqlite3-native which wasn't a big deal.

Cheers,

Richard