[machinestops]

See https://github.com/oasislinux/oasis for a proof of concept.

No dynamic linking locks you out of Clang+LLVM (mostly: static clang isn't an officially supported configuration, but it can probably be forced to exist. I haven't properly looked into it yet.), Firefox, Chromium, QtWebEngine, (so no alt browsers, either), and probably a lot more. Statically linking every single package out there requires a lot of patches to build systems to get them to properly do it. Many build systems don't respect LDFLAGS and CFLAGS, or respect one or the other, or only partially respect them, causing a great deal of annoyance if you have a nonstandard desired result, such as fully static builds.

[enriquto]

> Many build systems don't respect LDFLAGS and CFLAGS, or respect one or the other, or only partially respect them, causing a great deal of annoyance

Sounds good, doesn't it? This means that efforts to produce a fully static distribution would imply a sweeping wave of fixes across a wide range of packages and build systems!

[chasil]

But your ideal UNIX has already come and gone.

"[Ultrix] never supported shared libraries or dynamically linked executables."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrix

[machinestops]

The path of least resistance is to jam flags where they don't belong, sed patches, etc. Works well enough, so that's what ends up happening.