Baslinux mailing list

[Lee Forrest <lforrestster AT gmail.com>]

On Mon, Dec 25, 2006 at 03:24:12PM +0000, sindi keesan wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Dec 2006, sindi keesan wrote:
> 
> >On Sun, 24 Dec 2006, Lee Forrest wrote:
> >>On Mon, Dec 25, 2006 at 12:02:05AM +0000, sindi keesan wrote:
> >>>I found source code base64-1.4.tar.gz (202K) which compiled perfectly 
> >>>with
> >>>the compiler and glibc from SW8.1 and is at my site and also attached.
> >>mimencode is only 9K. As far as I know it will mimencode (and
> >>decode) anything.
> >Which program is used to shrink the size of compiled binaries?  strip?
> >I will check my notes.
> 
> strip removes extraneous code - shrank it from 37K to 6994 bytes
> upx packs the executable smaller (it needs to be unpacked before running 
> but I did not notice any delay) - shrank it further to 4818 bytes
> 
> Apparently makefiles don't strip binaries for you.  I wonder why.

I think they could. My impression is that they will do whatever
you want.

> Comes to 6.4K with man page in man format.  Text might be smaller.

I turn all man format (troll/groff) manpages into plain text on
my debian by putting them in a dir called "man1" and:

# man -M /path/to/dir/above/man1/ program_name | col -b > program_name,
then gzip them and put them into /usr/man on BL.

I have a sed script somewhere that would do the same job on BL3.

I've installed elvis from SW4.0 (I really need a full-featured editor)
and altered the man script like so:

gunzip /usr/man/$1.gz &&
/usr/bin/elvis /usr/man/$1 &&
gzip /usr/man/$1

Because I like to to put notes in the man pages, mainly usage examples,
enclosing them in [[...]] so they don't get mixed up with the original
page.

Those "&&" just mean that the command preceding them has to run
successfully before the next line is executed.


> Will this fit into BL3 floppy disk along with Lee's script so people can 
> send binary attachments using pmail?
> 
> Lee, can you strip and upx mimencode to smaller than this?

It's already stripped. Never heard of upx before this:

UPX is an advanced executable file compressor. UPX will typically
reduce the file size of programs and DLLs by around 50%-70%, thus
reducing disk space, network load times, download times etc. The
current version can compress executables for DOS, Linux/ELF (i386
only!) and some other files for different OS.
 
NOTE: This package is based on the UCL library, which is licensed under GPL.

Homepage: http://upx.sourceforge.net/

/quote -- debian package description: upx-ucl 1.25-4 (327K). David M.
tells me that ucl is a radically smaller version of libc6 that he
uses to compile apps for BL/libc5.

http://www.uclibc.org/

So I'd assume you could upx it a lot smaller. 

But honestly, I don't see a truly functional BL fitting on less
than about a dozen floppies. Which is doable.

But how much longer will floppies even be manufactured?

Thanks for the neat apps, Sindi,

Get me the templates for the various mails_with_attachments you
want to send, and I'll write that script.

Lee

-- 
Basic Linux: Small is Beautiful
http://www.basiclinux.com.ru