Re: *DO* dynamically link distributed executables

Rick Campbell wrote: On Linux, I think that precompiled binaries really need to be done by people who are familiar with the various distributions. Both RedHat and Debian have package managers which handle dependencies, and tend to have the necessary libraries available as standard packages. Slackware doesn't have dependency handling (or it didn't the last time that I installed it), but people who use Slackware tend to be more concerned with stability than having all of the latest cool packages, and are also less likely to be complete newbies who will give up if the package doesn't install out-of-the-box. People who have less standard installations get used to dealing with dependency issues, and are more likely to want to build from source anyhow. I think that all of this makes statically-linked binaries less important than they might otherwise appear to be. In my experience, a substantial proportion of the programs for which statically-linked binaries are made available are closed source, where a problem may equate to a lost customer. -- Glynn Clements <glynn(a)sensei.co.uk&gt;