Not quite, but you've identified a key leverage point. You only need to relink the apps, unless the newly patched library breaks its own ABI. Otherwise, it wou

Not quite, but you've identified a key leverage point. You only need to relink the apps, unless the newly patched library breaks its own ABI. Otherwise, it would be ideal for package distributors and package management systems to ship just a single .o file for an app, and do the final linking at package install time. Then updating a buggy static library doesn't require full recompile of any apps.