Comment 14 for bug 7655

        Hi,

On mer, oct 20, 2004, Andreas Barth wrote:
> I think we don't need to discuss about non-PIC for !i386 - this would be
> plainly broken. But, as you told us, on !i386 the bug is not existent
> (and looking at mips and alpha revealed no TEXTREL-section, so this
> matches). So, this is not an issue in this case (but I remarked it if a
> similar bugs happens to hit us, so that we remember in that case).
>
> For i386, using non-PIC in a shared lib is in general a RC bug. But, in
> this case the maintainers decision for not using it has reasons. Of
> course, we need to discuss whether there are better ways to achive it,
> without breaking policy. Implementing it as static lib comes to my mind
> for that. However, I'd like a broader discussion, including input from
> the security team, on using a static lib. Therefore, for the time scale
> of sarge, there is probably no better solution available, and I'm
> marking this bug as sarge-ignore.

 After discussion with upstream, PIC versus non-PIC is something like
 10% difference in performance. Upstream wondered why it would an issue
 to use PIC under i386 only, so I will seek clarification on why the
 policy has such a requirement. If the requirement is only there to
 protect against the level of support of non-PIC under !i386, which
 would be strange, then I suppose it's ok to keep shipping the lib with
 non-PIC under i386.

 If the policy has some other justification, PIC will be used and
 static libs will always be available for end-user apps to build with so
 that full performance can be achieved.

   Bye,

--
Loïc Minier <email address hidden>