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  • From: Ismael Luceno <ismael.luceno AT gmail.com>
  • To: sm-discuss <sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [SM-Discuss] RFC: Shortcuts for reducing base system breakage
  • Date: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 15:04:35 -0300

We might be able to reduce base system breakage to a minimum by
carefully choosing which spells we depend upon, e.g. bash and gawk had
break badly in the past.

I propose we depend on mawk instead of gawk, as the switch should not
break anything (didn't on my system so far). I will be working on
sorcery to make it possible to completely get rid of gawk.

Bash would be more difficult to replace, but perhaps we can solve
those problems by building it statically...

Also, I've been experimenting with musl for a while. In some cases I
got executables smaller than their dynamic counterparts, though most
of the time there's a 40% increase in size, which isn't so bad. While
that's rarely the case for larger software with more dependencies,
it's still an excellent alternative to static glibc, which tends to
produce executables many times larger.

Probably there are other libraries that could serve to reduce static
sizes (e.g. other implementations of readline).

Example:
$ ls -l /bin/mawk.* | awk '{print $5, $NF}'
184568 /bin/mawk.dynamic
249871 /bin/mawk.static




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