The customer is always right

Today, I had a funny conversation with a user. He popped into #gentoo-portage and asked how he could compile a whole system with static binaries.

<user> how exactly, do i build static binaries using portage?

well, and since I couldn’t think of a FEATURE or something, I just said

<blubb> user: you don’t at all
<blubb> because nobody would want that 😉

Which he didn’t seem to like very much:

<user> well clealry, i do

Why the hell would one want to have a whole system with only static binaries? It seems like a huge overhead to me. I thought perhaps there’s another, more elegant way to fix his problem. Asking why he wanted static binaries, I got this reply:

<user> you do not need to know why.
<user> this is irrelevant

Bummer. Am I working for the NSA now? “I can’t tell you, otherwise I’d have to kill you” comes to mind.

Anyway, I told him that I can’t help him then. He asked whether hacking CFLAGS would work, which I negated. After that, he finally told me what he wanted:

<user> i am placing a single application in a chroot
<user> i would like a single binary for that application
<user> so i dont have to write perl scripts to copy library dependencies into the chroot
<user> when it is, as i understand it, totally redundant
<user> and even if they do share the same memory space, maybe i dont want that?
<user> (the libraries outside and inside the chroot)

I still didn’t get why this guy wanted static libraries, but I pointed him to ROOT. Then, I thought I knew why this guy didn’t want to tell me his obscure reasons:

<user> as i understand it, it is also slower to dynamically link an executable than to statically link it

A-Ha. A ricer. Take a deep breath and tell him that it’ll only eat up his memory and hd space but not making anything really faster. Oh, and don’t forget the

<blubb> that’s why really nobody would want static linking 😛

<user> however, maybe i dont want this application to share the same executable memory space as other applications?

Now I started to feeling assed. This guy wanted me to tell him how to do something that is not possible, and he didn’t want to tell me why he wanted it, so screw him.

<blubb> maybe. but then you’ll have to go your own paths
<blubb> gentoo is not about beeing the users’ slave, it’s about beeing useful 😛

Obviously, he didn’t like my last statement at all.

<user> as ever
<user> if you actually want to make a vague attempt at securing a gentoo system
<user> which is really rather embarising
<user> y’know?
* user has quit (“leaving”)

It seems that certain people didn’t get that open source developers aren’t their personal slaves but free people with their own needs.