Re:Static Linking Considered Harmful (2004)
by cycloptic on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @07:40PM
(#24634356)
It's not guaranteed to break if you actually work with the distro maintainers. They don't want your packages breaking either.
Re:Static Linking Considered Harmful (2004)
by gridlockd on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @04:28AM
(#24636686)
Maintainers aren't going to keep outdated packages around forever, even if you "work with them". In effect, there is some ongoing maintenance there either way. If I just maintain my own dependencies, then I don't have to work with maintainers from a dozen distributions.
Re:Static Linking Considered Harmful (2004)
by cycloptic on Friday October 02, 2020 @09:54AM
(#24662597)
>Maintainers aren't going to keep outdated packages around forever, even if you "work with them".
In general, yes they will. You don't have to do much besides communicate to them that it's safe to bump a dependency and won't cause breakage. And you don't have to track down a dozen maintainers either, simply putting it in your release notes where they can find it is enough. The main reason why packages are dropped is because of lack of maintenance, possibly caused by absent or unresponsive upstream. That's what outdated means. Do you think packagers are going through all the trouble of dropping unmaintained versions of Python 2 on a whim?
On Linux, relying on system provided dependencies, especially C++ ones, is guaranteed to break over time and over different distributions. So you would have to maintain your Linux version either way, shipping with your dependencies is just less insane.