Baslinux mailing list

[David Moberg <davidjmoberg AT gmail.com>]

On 12/1/05, Ian <info AT freedomnet.org.uk> wrote:
> > > is it because it was intended to be more "low-resource"
> >
> > Yes, libc5 is much smaller than glibc2.  BL3 is designed
> > for 386/486 laptops (or desktops) with as little as 4mb RAM.
> > The minimum for BL2 is 486DX with 8mb RAM.
>
> This would seem to suggest that there is some advantage
> of using glibc2 over using libc5?
> Is that perhaps that newer programs are unlikely to
> work properly if compiled to use libc5?

Many newer programs will not even compile with libc5, i.e.
you need to use glibc2 or uclibc just to compile them. The
C programming language has changed somewhat since
libc5 was released.

> Theres this newer library, uclibc, which Ive seen mentioned.
> Ive heard its very small.

About 1/8th to 1/4th the size of glibc, depending upon how it
is compiled. Roughly half the size of libc5.

> If newer programs are compilied
> to work with this, might they not be more likely to work
> properly than if compiled to work with libc5?

Yes, uClibc is much better than libc5 for new programs.
There still some things that still only work right with glibc,
though. (e.g. MPlayer and the very latest version of netpbm,
I believe)

> If that were so, would not uclibc be a better choice for
> BL than libc5?
> (I have in mind mutt in particular)
>
> I can see this would probably involve a lot of work
> recompiling all these programs.

And that is why BL3 uses libc5. Because libc5 has many,
many more programs available for it than uClibc does.

David