Another point for dynamic linking: a function is loaded into memory only when it's needed by the program, instead of a statically compiled program that loads the library code in its memory. (Ok, everyone has 4+ GB on his pc... but that isn't a good reason at all).

Add: if there are two program that need of the same library function, the library is loaded once and its memory is shared

In my mind, that last part should read "Complains and throws up vague errors about missing dependencies on your system."

Then its "Oh my bad, I compiled that library and forgot to run ldconfig. Sorry ./configure!"

Then stop forgetting to run ldconfig.

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Some interesting information here http://sta.li/.

Yeah yeah yeah. I never said I was good at compiling...

My point being,. if the source archive just 'came with' everything it needed, libraries included, then it wouldn't be such a ... troubleshooting process ... to compile and install software.

You'll take you time to download huuuuuuge source packages

It is in the design phase, so its mostly theory ATM. I'll believe it when I see it.

Yeah, that's why I said interesting information. I don't think it's made much progress since the last time I looked a couple of years ago. And I don't expect much in the future: lots of people are interesting in complaining about complicated software, a lot less are interested in writing simpler software.

Having used Docker and created quite a few images,. I think you'd be surprised how small the needed packages would be for most software. I'd say most range between 1M at the smallest and 300M at the biggest.

Luckily we are in the broadband generation and getting a 300M file is trivial. I use 300M watching 5 minutes of Netflix, or browsing the internet for 10 minutes.

I think that's a weak generalization: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalization

One advantage of the shared libraries is that it enable you to get such a surprising amount of software onto an installation disk. And while some of us are "in the broadband generation", that isn't true of most of the world. Even apart from the cost, I wouldn't like to try downloading a distro over a satellite connection!

From distributions' point of view shared libraries save disk space and RAM. Also maintenance is much simpler - only one copy of the
library should be updated when the need arise.

But from the point of view of user that need install version of software different from the one provided by distribution or from
software vendor who is want that his binary will work across different version of different distribution the first concern is just to make it work. Not disk space saving, not security. Just make software works.

And it's not that one POV is correct and another is wrong - it's just different groups of people with different priorities.

And by the way, for those from second groups that want create portable executables following tools may be of use:
- Statifier (http://statifier.sf.net)
- Ermine (http://magicermine.com)

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Without dynamic libraries, you would require a lot more physical memory in a system for the same workload. Programs would also load slower.

Can't one build all one's apps statically? Can't one invent one's own distribution, 'Static Linux'? I'm a Slacker (and have no dependency problems and never build apps statically.) but it would seem that this could be a new branch of 'Linux from Scratch'.

They do, in Mac OS X, and it works great. Linux developers apparently never got the memo that users want simple application installs.

You're right, I don't have the stats to support that. Anyway, it's off-topic and I'm sorry I mentioned it at all.

Linux developers response has been to use package managers instead.

In the title you talked about shared libraries, but then your posts have all been about distributing dependencies with source tarballs. I think that's unrelated to the issue of shared vs static libraries.

Bandwidth isn't free on the server side though. Even so, it's probably more about conventions than any technical reasons. I think packaging deps with tarballs would also have the added benefit of saying "this software has been tested with library version x.y.z". Maybe you can get the GNU people to add this step to their standards: Making Releases.