Re: bignum branch

[Paul Eggert]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> > libc and libm are dynamically linked and are essential for Emacs
> > Lisp.
>
> That's a strawman I didn't expect to see from you.

It's not a strawman at all. It's close to what libgmp is for the bignum branch. 
The bignum branch requires libgmp functionality, and arranges for a substitute 
in Emacs itself if libgmp isn't supplied by the system. Similarly, Emacs 
requires C and math functionality, and arranges for substitutes in Emacs itself 
if some of the required functions do not exist in the current platform's libraries.

> > Some GNU/Linux distributions don't even fully support static linking
> > any more, for security reasons.
>
> Really?  But we do link to Gnulib statically, so it sounds like the
> platforms we care about do still support static linking, and probably
> will for the observable future, right?

These platforms allow you to build and use your own .a files, since that's 
basically the same as building and using your own .o files. But they don't 
supply .a files for standard libraries, so they won't let you statically link to 
their libgmp. That is what I meant by "not fully support". Static linking is 
generally discouraged on these platforms, and we shouldn't try to fight that.