That is completely ridiculous. Pointing out that statically compiling dependencies or shipping them with a game can solve many so called compatibility problems is directly related to games working on linux.
As you can see, both comments were indeed flagged by one of those stackexchange types that is always marking useful questions as off-topic. Probably the same person who thinks using anything but rpm is bad.
The thread has then been detached for the crime of discussing voting, so only we can see it.
The first rule of HN voting is not to discuss voting.
It's a wonderful idea - on paper, but all that's needed is for one of the many mandatory deps for running a GL program to link against the system libcurl or any other replaced dep and you're back in Crashville again, population 1 - cloth-eared developer
Are there mandatory dependencies for running a GL program that can't work without using the system libcurl shared library? How does that make any sense?
If you distribute and link libcurl v69 dynamically, the dynamic linker symbol table for your process will contain references to v69 symbols. If you then load an e.g. GL driver that in turn links libcurl v42, the GL driver will end up with some combination of v69 and maybe v42 symbols, despite being compiled against v42 headers containing v42 struct sizes and offsets.
Now there is an opportunity for silent memory corruption in your program, one that even once detected, which may not happen for years, cannot easily be fixed without completely rearchitecting the build.
When using a wide variety of system APIs including at least NSS and OpenGL, there is little control over what dynamic libraries end up loaded, the exact configuration will vary across machines
Substitute libcurl for libexpat or libX11 or libstdc++ and the principle continues to apply. I can't think of a good reason something like libcurl would be used by the Nvidia driver or some bizarro embedded board's GL driver, but that doesn't mean the Nvidia driver doesn't now or in the future link it, and if/when that day arrives, the problem lies entirely with the program that mixed random system deps with random self-compiled deps.
