The question about it comes up every so often, but nobody has ever put up the effort to maintain it. It appears to be a lot of work for very little gain.
Certain libs use dlopen() which needs dynamic linking. Mesa, Pam, Qt (static is possible but a lot of stuff will break), Glibc(static is possible but nsswitch.conf will break), Alsa. So most graphical apps will fail to be pure static(Prob possible but will hardware/config specific). So we need to tackle and provide alternatives to dlopen.
Running NSS and PAM modules in-process was IMO a historical mistake. Convenient in one aspect, rather inconvenient and impractical in many others.
If we were to redo these today, I think we'd do them out-of-process and talk to them over UNIX domain sockets or pipes.
The transitive dependencies of NSS and PAM modules can also wreak havoc with your application. There are many bugs which have arisen because of these limitations. Yes, looking at you, GnuTLS.
OpenBSD chose BSD Auth over PAM for this reason. With BSD Auth the C API invokes binaries in /usr/lib/auth which are SUID or SGID according to which permissions are required for the credential store.
Well, not sure about C (but I assume something using gtk could be pain), but if we expand that to C++, I mean, I would expect firefox and chrome to be basically unbuildable in static manner.
> no matter how hard you try
Well, no. If you are willing to rewrite it (even significant changes), of course it will be possible to built it statically. That does not mean it is doable in practice.
I doubt they meant "no matter how hard you try" nor were limiting this to C programs only. Something the size of Firefox, for example, with hundreds of files, multiple languages and dozens of platform variations, is simply not designed for a fully static build and trying to modify it to build like that would be an absurd amount of work for basically no reason, so it hasn't been done and probably never will be.
Add licensing complications to that (Qt is notorious for this) and OP's statement is for all intents and purposes true.
Perhaps so, but Firefox is but one program among the hundreds or thousands that are available in a typical Linux distribution. "Most" implies a quantitative analysis (i.e., more than half), which I think is disputable.
Static linking is an atavism. Application authors don't spend time thinking about it any more.
The main reason static linking persisted as A Thing into the 1990s was that fossilized vendor UNIXes didn't support it, or didn't support it well. Those systems are all extinct.
About the only place you still see static linking is embedded. And that is its own world.
That’s a pretty bold claim. Can you identify a specific C program that cannot be built statically, no matter how hard you try?