PYTOGO

[Richard Laager]

On 09/18/2018 02:06 PM, Achim Gratz via devel wrote:
> That will not go down well with system packagers.  Building "static" is
> one of those ideas that apparently can't be weeded out.  I expect the
> distributions to change their toolchains in no time to default to shared
> linking (system installed) libraries or else ignore Go completely.

I'm doing some digging, and from what I can see Debian/Ubuntu added
support for shared linking Go libraries and then removed it a couple
years later. I'm asking in IRC to try to get a more
conclusive/authoritative answer.

As a user, the downsides of static linking are increased disk space
usage, increased memory usage, and eliminating ASLR. These probably
aren't huge concerns in this case.

As a packager, the biggest downside is that the package has to be
recompiled if any of its dependencies are updated. I'm not sure how the
Go team is handling that in Debian. Specifically, is it their job to
rebuild reverse dependencies when uploading a new library, or is it my
job to notice and rebuild? That's a rhetorical question for this list.
I'll ask the Debian Go people at some point.

-- 
Richard