Mozilla Static Builds are well documented and supported by Mozilla Organization: http://www.mozilla.org/build/static-build.html They are not like traditional static builds. The system libraries get still linked dinamically. Only Mozilla internal components get statically linked to the "*-bin" executable. This make sense, since those components are not shared between aplications. By using a static build you get a faster executable (start-time and runtime) and less memory usage. Official Firefox releases by Mozilla.org are statically linked (see size of *-bin executable and the missing shared libraries, or check "about:buildconfig") (And I believe official Thunderbird releases also). Mozilla.org thinks static builds are perfect for end users. Gentoo should provide this option also. Since the meaning of "Mozilla Static Build" is not the same of a traditional static built application (ie. system libraries still get linked dinamically) I suggest we should create a new USE flag (mozstatic?) To enable Mozilla Static Builds simply add to the configure script: --enable-static --disable-shared --- This bug is a duplicate of bug 76948 , I'm creating a new one trying to provide extra arguments in favor of this option. Sorry for the dupe
Why don't you just use -bin then? Fail to see what's the advantage here.
For the same reasons Gentoo is a source distribution and not a binary one. - To customize another options for your preference (eg. ipv6, gnome, xinerama, xprint, etc). - To optimize for your hardware - To use shared png,jpeg,zlib libraries instead of *-bin static ones
When more testing is done, maybe until a much larger group of people request such a feature please use *-bin
