Symbad: Symbols for Binary Application Database

[Mauricio A. Araya López]

Hello,

I don't know if anyone is still interested on putting a distribution
(like rawhide) on "diet" for OLPC. If so, we think that the first step
is to identify which libraries or specific symbols are not been
used by any program on the distribution. Knowing this, a library can
be reduced only to the needed functions, or removed completely if the
library is not used at all. Also, there is some binaries that are linked
to lots of libraries, but they only use few of them. Knowing this, the
complex package dependency graph can be shrank, making more feasible
a minimal distribution.

Here in Chile we are working on a program that search for every binary
at the system (including libraries), identify for each one which symbols
are exported and imported, and make a suitable mapping between the
binaries files using 'ldd'. All this is inserted to a sqlite3 database
(currently we are developing support for mysql and postgresql). Also,
this program can do queries to the database (similar to RPM queries),
and give important information for developers and distribution packagers.

This program is called Symbad: SYMbols of Binary Applications Database:

Current Release page:
http://csrg.inf.utfsm.cl/~maray/symbad/

Git Repository:
git://csrg.inf.utfsm.cl/maray/symbad.git

Developers Wiki-page:
https://csrg.inf.utfsm.cl/twiki4/bin/view/OLPC/SymBad

Please note that this program is currently under heavy development,
so maybe you will find some bugs, or unimplemented features.
If you find any bug, want some functionality or have any comment,
please send me an email to <maray at inf.utfsm.cl>. Obviously, this program
is open source, so I we are fully open to include patches or any help
that you can give to us.

Our experience using this program is very impressive, because we
found lots of libraries that were installed, and they are not used
by any binary or library. Also we detect some of binaries that do
not use any symbol of a library that is linked to (for more information
look the wiki-page). But, as in any software, we need users...

Bye and thanks!

-- 
Mauricio Araya L. 
UTFSM CSRG Developer, cel: 09 3469 128
Est. Magister en Ciencias de la Informatica UTFSM, Valparaiso, Chile
counter.li.org: #249395, http://www.inf.utfsm.cl/~maray