>If one program on your system depends on a quirk of libfoobar-1.0.3, and another program on your system depends on a quirk of libfoobar-1.0.4, you're fucked. You can't have both programs on your system, and Linux distributors will simply stop updating one of them until the author magically fixes it, which happens approximately never.
I've not experienced that. If the package is maintained at all, then it will get updated. People are still somehow maintaining Perl 5 libraries and putting out bugfix releases, which are functionally equivalent to dynamic linking.
If it's not maintained, then of course it will get removed from the distribution, for that and for a number of other reasons.
> People are still somehow maintaining Perl 5 libraries and putting out bugfix releases, which are functionally equivalent to dynamic linking.
Not to be pedantic, but having multiple versions of any Perl library, or multiple versions of Perl on a single server without things getting stepped on is trivially easy. There's utils to switch Perl versions as well. I mean, it's Perl.
Perl has a long, long, long history and culture of testing, backwards compatibility, Kwalitee Assurance, and porting to every system imaginable behind it as well, so if some Perl script from the 90's still runs with little to no modification, that should not exactly be seen as a rarity.
I don't mean modules installed from cpan, this is specifically for things like Perl and Python modules packaged in Debian. On purpose, there is usually no way to install more than one version of those with the system package manager. Maintainers seem to be doing a fine job of keeping them up-to-date. One of the major reasons to do this is so packages that depend on those libraries actually DO get tested with updates and don't get neglected and stuck on some old buggy version.
There are a lot of reasons to prefer static linking, but to me the argument of "it means you don't need to keep your package up to date with bug and security fixes" never held up, from a distro point of view anyway.
I've not experienced that. If the package is maintained at all, then it will get updated. People are still somehow maintaining Perl 5 libraries and putting out bugfix releases, which are functionally equivalent to dynamic linking.
If it's not maintained, then of course it will get removed from the distribution, for that and for a number of other reasons.