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Comment by giovannibajo1 | Hacker News Reader

You'd run "pkg-manager upgrade", just like you do with dynamic linking.

Yep but now instead of fetching 1 updated library, you depend on everybody and their cat to rebuild their binaries and publish updated versions.

Not really, I depend on my distro to push updated packages that I will update. And I also hope that my distro pushes me binary diffs so that it's going to be very fast.

The point is: in the context of a Linux distro, it's not true that you need dynamic linking to be able to do security patches effectively. What users do is to run the package manager to update the system; the package manager can provide updates to static binaries as well (and do it efficiently). It's just a matter of tooling; current package managers are designed around the concept of dynamic libraries, but they could be updated.

Is it practical to make diffs of recompiled binaries? Don't you need to compile to position independent code? Or otherwise make sure that most of the code's position does not change when some statically linked library changes?

Slightly different comparison, but I remember some google project to do this for shipping updates a while ago. Must have been for android, but I can't remember.

Chrome, actually. Called Courgette [1]. This would actually be really awesome to apply to statically-linked distro updates.

[1]: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/softwar...

There is no reason binaries have to be downloaded completely. They can be patched. And we can use rabin fingerprinting for deduplicating to not send duplicate blocks for each binary. Also, don't forget Chrome's approach of patching the disassembly of a binary. https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/softwar...

You would thing a distro like this would be more like gentoo...you recompile stuff as needed (which for openssl means almost everything).

Gentoo is dynamically linked, so you only recompile if there's an ABI break - a major version - not a patch/minor release. And, you only recompile the stuff that directly links to it.

With static linking, you literally need to recompile everything that uses the library in any form, for every single change. So of there's a security fix in openssl and LibreOffice uses openssl, you need to recompile LibreOffice. If QEMU uses libssh2 which uses openssl, you need to recompile QEMU, even though it doesn't use openssl directly. With Gentoo you just recompile openssl and that's it.

And if there a fix to glibc, you need to recompile EVERYTHING because everything would be statically linked to it.

You don't have to recompile everything. If your system keeps a cache of object files, you only have to relink everything, which is quicker.

This is why binary patching exists: http://www.daemonology.net/bsdiff/

You mean "git update":

  * Upgrade/install using git, no package manager needed

How exactly this is going to work, I don't know.

You probably mean `git fetch` or `git pull`. There is no `git update` in the default feature set.

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