Today, I had a funny conversation with a user. He popped into #gentoo-portage and asked how he could compile a whole<\/b> system with static binaries.<\/p>\n
<user> how exactly, do i build static binaries using portage?<\/p>\n
well, and since I couldn’t think of a FEATURE or something, I just said<\/p>\n
<blubb> user: you don’t at all
\n<blubb> because nobody would want that \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n
Which he didn’t seem to like very much:<\/p>\n
<user> well clealry, i do<\/p>\n
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:<\/p>\n
<user> you do not need to know why.
\n<user> this is irrelevant<\/p>\n
Bummer. Am I working for the NSA now? “I can’t tell you, otherwise I’d have to kill you” comes to mind.<\/p>\n
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: <\/p>\n
<user> i am placing a single application in a chroot
\n<user> i would like a single binary for that application
\n<user> so i dont have to write perl scripts to copy library dependencies into the chroot
\n<user> when it is, as i understand it, totally redundant
\n<user> and even if they do share the same memory space, maybe i dont want that?
\n<user> (the libraries outside and inside the chroot)<\/p>\n
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:<\/p>\n
<user> as i understand it, it is also slower to dynamically link an executable than to statically link it<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
<blubb> that’s why really nobody would want static linking \ud83d\ude1b<\/p>\n
<user> however, maybe i dont want this application to share the same executable memory space as other applications?<\/p>\n
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<\/b> he wanted it, so screw him.<\/p>\n
<blubb> maybe. but then you’ll have to go your own paths
\n<blubb> gentoo is not about beeing the users’ slave, it’s about beeing useful \ud83d\ude1b<\/p>\n
Obviously, he didn’t like my last statement at all. <\/p>\n
<user> as ever
\n<user> if you actually want to make a vague attempt at securing a gentoo system
\n<user> which is really rather embarising
\n<user> y’know?
\n* user has quit (“leaving”)<\/p>\n
It seems that certain people didn’t get that open source developers aren’t their personal slaves but free people with their own needs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading The customer is always right<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/blubb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/blubb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/blubb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/blubb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/blubb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/blubb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/blubb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions\/33"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/blubb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/blubb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/blubb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}