[gnramires]

I should have been more balanced or nuanced a bit: I also don't think static linking is to be forbidden or completely shunned. As Linus himself says, a combination of both may be ideal. For basic system libraries like GUI libraries the current approach works well. But you should be free to static link if you want, and if there are serious issues if you don't. Maybe dynamic linking should be focused on a smaller number of well curated libraries and the rest should be left to static. Library archeology seems like a potential serious problem years from now.

I still think better listing dependencies (perhaps with the option to pin an exact version?) would be helpful, as well as better usage of something like semver. Someone mentioned binaries include paths to dependencies, but as far as I know, there is no tool to automatically try to resolve those dependencies or standard interface, maybe some more tooling in this area would help.

Another nice point about how it current works is that I think it relieves work from programmers. The policy of "Don't worry about distribution (just tell us it exists)" from distros seems like one less headache for the creator (and you can provide static linked binaries too if you want).

As most things in life, the ideal is somewhere in the middle...