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I don't think that makes a lot of sense in a distro. If package A gets an update, it means a sufficiently bad bug was discovered in it. If it happens to be a li
by lrem 5y ago
I don't think that makes a lot of sense in a distro. If package A gets an update, it means a sufficiently bad bug was discovered in it. If it happens to be a library, you want to make sure you update every package B that uses it. Which, conveniently, the distro solves for you too.
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoThis is true, but only if I'm actually getting everything from the distro repository and I'm able to keep all of it on the latest version. In practice, I sadly tend to run into situations where I need stuff from other places.
- lrem 5y agoBut then you don't want the software from the distro to be statically linked, but the software from other places. In which case it doesn't matter that much what does the distro do.
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoThe main use case for the distro itself being statically linked is being able to pin specific software at old versions. I wouldn't do this often, but it could be very helpful at times—sometimes even just temporarily for testing. But also, package managers in general make me kind of uncomfortable, because I feel like I never know the full state of my system. I've certainly run into library errors in the past with official packages (a long time ago), and while it's probably because I did something dumb, I also probably had a decent reason, and static linking would keep it all self-contained.