[plug] building static binaries

[James Devenish]

In message <1072681007.15478.14.camel at lukenew>
on Mon, Dec 29, 2003 at 02:56:47PM +0800, Luke Dudney wrote:
> I'm trying to install EtherApe 0.9.0 onto a server system which does not
> have any X or gnome libraries (libX11, libgnome, libglade etc)
> installed. Etherape's dependencies are numerous, but I'm not really keen
> on installing all of them onto this server.

Does it actually need all those dependencies? (I don't use the product,
so I don't know). That is, will it do everything it needs to do if you
compile it without the GUI stuff?

> I've tried setting CFLAGS=-static but this results in an error:
[...]
> checking for res_init in -lbind... no
> checking for res_init in -lresolv... no
[...]
> checking for res_mkquery in -lbind... no
> checking for res_mkquery in -lresolv... no
> configure: error: No resolver library found

Is your system missing libresolv.a? What might be happening is that the
linker is looking for libresolv.a but finding only libresolv.so or
something. Also, I would have suspected that LDFLAGS=-static is the
thing to use, rather than CFLAGS=-static.

> Obviously I'm not going about this the right way. Can someone suggest
> how I can achieve what I'm trying to do? Is it even advisable, or should
> I just bite the bullet and install the deps?

Keep in mind that you'd only be installing the libs, not the X server,
etc., so it's not so bad. Also keep in mind that even if the libs are
statically linked, they might require certain support files (e.g.
configuration files) to be present on the system. So...might be better
to either compile without the GUI libs in the first place, or install
the GUI libs on the server.

PS. I'm glad I don't use EtherApe because one unfortunate mistake in its
pronunciation would make something that sounds wrong in so many ways.
Like viagrafix and powergenitalia.