What is "static" and what are "static rpms" (Re: New Swarm RPMs! Fresh. Hot. Tasty.

[pauljohn]

Alex Lancaster noticed that we could make the swarm rpms smaller by
putting stuff for building statically compiled swarm programs into a
different package. That is what swarm-static rpms are.  (I, myself,
would never have been able to guess which files from the swarm install
could be diverted in that way, but Alex did, and if something in the
swarm distribution ever changes that alters which files are for a static
build, I'll be sunk.)

As the readme on my page says,
"The static rpms are for people who want to debug/profile Swarm
itself."  I never messed with the static rpms until a month ago, when I
was trying to make the random library in swarm go faster.  Unless you
are trying to work on the Swarm library innards, you don't need the
static.  I'll always leave the new static rpms up, just not the old
ones.  (I've been getting some emails about disk usage on my system, so
I'm trying to be a bit more considerate.)

The static rpms are necessary if you want to build a static swarm
program, that is, one which does not dynamically load the swarm
libraries, but rather has them "compiled in" to the program.  Statically
compiled programs are nice sometimes because some things go a bit more
quickly.  A statically compiled program is about 15x as big in size as a
regular one, that's the big minus.   All swarm programs were statically
compiled when I started with this, and then Marcus joined up and made
the dynamic linking work, so now our hard disks do not fill up so fast.

I've never tested this notion, but it seems logical to me that one ought
to be able to run a statically compiled app even if the swarm dynamic
libraries are removed from a system.  There was some talk "way back
when" about compiling apps statically on Windows systems and then
shipping them around with just a few additional files.  I *guess* you
would not need the swarm stuff, but you would still need blt, tcl/tk,
and cygwin.dll.  But something must have gone wrong there, because the
subject came up last week and the answer seemed to be that it does not
work.

Myriam Abramson wrote:
> 
> > Because the static rpms are not used by most people and they consume a
> > lot of space, I'm going to start erasing the older static rpms. So, if
> > you want them, you have fair warning.
> 
> I'm sorry. What are the static rpms for? I couldn't get that from the
> web site.
> 
> --
> 
>                                     myriam
> 
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-- 
Paul E. Johnson                       email: address@hidden
Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn
University of Kansas                  Office: (785) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66045                FAX: (785) 864-5700

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