Comment by crote
16 hours ago
I don't think this makes a meaningful difference. The installation is a `curl | sh`, which downloads a tarball, which gets extracted to some directory in $PATH.
It currently includes two executables, but having it contain two executables and a bunch of .so libraries would be a fairly trivial change. It only gets messy when you want it to make use of system-provided versions of the libraries, rather than simply vendoring them all yourself.
It gets mess not just in that way but also someone can have a weird LD_LIBRARY_PATH that starts to have problems. Statically linking drastically simplifies distribution and you’ve had to have distributed 0 software to end users to believe otherwise. The only platform this isn’t the case for is Apple because they natively supported app bundles. I don’t know if flat pack solves the distribution problem because I’ve not seen a whole lot of it in the ecosystem - most people seem to generally still rely on the system package manager and commercial entities don’t seem to really target flat pack.
When you're shipping software, you have full control over LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Your entry point can be e.g. a shell script that sets it.
There is not so much difference between shipping a statically linked binary, and a dynamically linked binary that brings its own shared object files.
But if they are equivalent, static linking has the benefit of simplicity: Why create and ship N files that load each other in fancy ways, when you can do 1 that doesn't have this complexity?
That’s precisely my point. It’s insanely weird to have a shell script to setup the path for an executable binary that can’t do it for itself. I guess you could go the RPATH route but boy have I only experienced pain from that.
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