[Pkg-zsh-devel] What is the difference between zsh and zsh-static ?

[Axel Beckert]

Hi shirish,

shirish शिरीष wrote:
> Please think of me as a pretty dumb person. Can somebody tell me why
> and where I would need zsh-static ?

zsh-static is statically compiled (i.e. doesn't require any
dynamically loaded libraries to be present) and will work even if
libraries zsh (in general) needs are broken on the system. So it's
more robust in case of a broken system.

Most packages which provide statically compiled versions are either
very close to the system (like e2fsck-static), a shell (bash-static,
zsh-static mksh-static -- the latter is part of the mksh package) or a
bunch of small rescue utilities (busybox-static).

> I do use now and then zsh after booting into my session .

Which is perfectly fine. That's what nearly all of us do.

> Is zsh-static better than zsh package that is in Debian ?

As mentioned above, it's more robust in case of broken systems, but as
mentioned in the blog posting, it has less features due to some
restrictions with static compilation.

> I did look at the output of zsh and zsh-static but neither of them
> gave me anything useful to know the difference from each other.

I must admit that the package description doesn't help much if someone
doesn't know for what statically compiled programs are typically used
or what their attributes are.

Do the explanations above help? If so, I'd put some of them in
zsh-static's long package description (so it will be in there in case
we keep the package).

		Regards, Axel
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