Eliminating static binaries (Was: Unwanted RPM dependencies)

[Bernardo Innocenti]

David Zeuthen wrote:

> Wasn't a goal when I wrote the OLPC build system (it was, however, a
> goal to create four separate images aka streams (devel/non-devel
> msdos-partitioned-ext3-for-usb-sticks/jffs2). I appreciate that goals
> change however, I'm not active in the OLPC project anymore.

Actually, I'm not really sure the images are identical...
But the non-devel stream has been killed off some time ago.


> I was proposing to create an empty dummy RPM package with
>  Provides: mkinitrd

Cool, I use exactly the same trick to remove MTAs from
servers with qmail.

But we can't do that in the ext3 image.  And mkinitrd
in itself is no big deal.  The dependencies on lvm2
and device-mapper can be dropped with minimal changes
to the script.


>> Also, I dismiss the argument that today's computers have
>> huge hard drives anyway so let's waste them.  Bigger hard
>> drives are meant to hold more data, not the same amount of
>> data stored in inefficient formats.  
> 
> Take it easy, it's not like I'm disagreeing with you.

Sorry, it wasn't directed at you specifically.  I was just
worried they'd bury me in replies telling system recovery
stories where static binaries saved the day ;-)


> Yes, in 99.999% of all cases (that's five nines for you), it's
> absolutely unnecessary to have any static binaries at all in the default
> Fedora install. If you had read the archives of fedora-devel-list (which
> you Cc'ed yourself) you would have found
> 
>  - a huge discussion on "static linking considered harmful"; started
>    by Ulrich Drepper. Some people have even more extreme points of
>    of view than you. Here's a paper by Ulrich
> 
>     http://people.redhat.com/drepper/no_static_linking.html

I'm a long time subscriber and I remember this
thread.

But IIRC, it was about local copies of system libraries
such as zlib in such as cvs and svn, and originated
because the security flaw in zlib required lots of
package updates.


>  - that early user space in Fedora is increasingly moving to
>    dynamic linking; that's a good thing; even better if people
>    remember to kill statically linked binaries :-)

Now that we're trying to reduce bloat in the OLPC image,
it would be nice if the relevant upstream package
maintainers could make these changes.  I could also
come up with patches of my own, but I have less context
and no experience with rebuilding these packages.

-- 
   // Bernardo Innocenti
 \X/  http://www.codewiz.org/