Why Are You Using FreeBSD?

[Matthew Seaman]

On 01/06/2012 09:16, Damien Fleuriot wrote:
> The reason I rebuild the ports last is because, unless I'm wrong, any
> port that's statically linked to a system library would be linked to the
> old library from the old world.

Uh -- if it's statically linked, then the object code is copied from the
library into the executable image.  There's no dependency between the
static library and the executable once the executable has been produced.

However, ports very rarely use static linkage, and even more rarely use
static linkage against system libraries.  Even if the system library did
change, that wouldn't trigger a rebuild of the port, as there's no
version number to trigger it.  You could, I suppose, rebuild every port
for every system update, but this would be a huge waste of time and CPU
power.

There have been occasions where eg. there has been a security update to
one of the OpenSSL libraries in base, and the security advisory has
recommended rebuilding statically linked binaries, but that only
happened once in about 10 years.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey


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