On Sun, 2009-12-13 at 20:18 +0100, Renat Golubchyk wrote: > Hi everyone! > > I need to build a static binary of a program I wrote. The problem is > that most packages only install dynamic version of the libraries. > There > are the "static" and "static-libs" USE flags, but only a tiny fraction > of packages support them. Modifying every relevant ebuild is not > really > a viable solution since the list of packages is quite long and could > change later. > > So what can I do if I'd like to avoid compiling every package > manually?
There is no easy answer to your question. I think because, with a lot of programs it "just depends". Some packages already include static libraries (e.g. python and it doesn't make sense to compile the python package statically because it will break a great many things). Some programs just weren't designed to be static (e.g. imagemagick or apache). GTK+, i believe, can't be built statically as it uses dynload for themes, input methods, etc etc. Even most proprietary gtk-based software that I know of (e.g. Adobe Flash and VMWare) either are distributed with GTK+ linked dynamically or they provide their own GTK libs). You can apply "-static" to CFLAGS, but make sure you have a binpkg built first, as there is a chance you may break something. You can also try passing "--enable-static" to EXTRA_ECONF. That's probably safer than the former, but the same caveat applies. Most of the things where static is "useful" and safe already have a static flag though or provide static libs by default. I think the only exception I've encountered was e2fsprogs. For that I usually compile my own static executables. HTH, -a
