[static] linking

[Charles.Young at Level3.com (Young, Charles)]

The only good reason I can think of to link/compile -static is to not have to depend on and trust the shared libraries, which could be altered by a rootkit, etc.  This provides you with a so-called "trusted" binary, albeit bloated :)

But hey, if they fit on a CD, who cares!  It's kind of an oddball situation though.  I can't think of another good reason to do it if the machine is reasonably secure/hardened.

Are there other good reasons?

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Chuck Young
Security Consulting
Level(3) Communications
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-----Original Message-----
From: Derek Martin [mailto:blu at sophic.org]
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2003 2:24 PM

---snip---

It depends on how you compile (or actually, link) the program when
you're building it.  If you build it with -static, you link AT COMPILE
TIME against the static library.  Otherwise, by default (if your
system supports shared objects) you link AT RUN TIME against the
shared library.

Generally speaking, most systems use the dynamic libraries for the
vast majority of cases.  The point is this saves huge amounts of disk
space.  With the static libraries, the library is copied into the
executable file of every binary that is linked statically, wasting
huge amounts of space.  That's the (main) point of shared libraries.

---snip---