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by dvanduzer 4747 days ago
You seem to misunderstand how static linking works.

If P statically links to its own version of L2, then L2 is just a part of P. The fact that there may be a dynamically linked version of L2 elsewhere on the system is irrelevant.

Consider:

  L -> L2 -> P

  L -> L2 -> Q

  L -> L2 -> R
If the authors of L2 release a new version that P and Q are happy with, but creates an extremely subtle segfault condition in R, then what?

The packager could just wait to release the upgrade to L2 until all downstream packages have compatible releases.

The packager could backport a subset of the L2 patches that is still compatible with R (Redhat does this a lot).

The packager could silently curse the author of R for not statically linking the necessary frozen-in-time version of L2 and thus bypassing this problem entirely.
1 comments
tmoertel 4747 days ago
> If P statically links to its own version of L2, then L2 is just a part of P. The fact that there may be a dynamically linked version of L2 elsewhere on the system is irrelevant.

No, it's highly relevant because when a security fix lands for L2, it takes longer to propagate to users if projects like P bundle their own versions of L2 as part of their releases. In that case, users must wait for the project developers to work the already-released L2 fixes into their own bundled versions of L2 and then release new versions of the projects before any downstream users get the fix. But if P and other projects use the same version of L2 that everybody else does, everybody gets the fix right away.

> If the authors of L2 release a new version that P and Q are happy with, but creates an extremely subtle segfault condition in R, then what? ...

> The packager could silently curse the author of R for not statically linking the necessary frozen-in-time version of L2 and thus bypassing this problem entirely.

More likely, the packager would patch L2 to fix the problem with R and then talk to the upsteam L2 developers to get the patch included in L2 proper. This way, R's users get the fix right away and the problem gets eliminated at its source, in L2, rather than papered-over in R's private copy of L2.

As I wrote in my original post, one of the big benefits of the "no bundling" policy is to make sure that patches flow upsteam to where they belong instead of piling up in downstream repos where they do good for only one dependent project instead of all dependent projects.

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