On Mon, Sep 03, 2001 at 06:37:20AM +1000, Glenn McGrath wrote:
>
> If we use busybox dpkg-deb instead of ar and tar it will reduce busybox by
> about 6.5kB (by my calculations), one of the reasons being that most of
> the busybox unarchiving applets have been reorganised, however tar hasnt
> been, currently busybox dpkg-deb uses seperate untar'ing code to the tar
> applet. I have a patch somewhere to integrate tar with the common code the
> unarchiving applets use, but it had still needed further testing and i got
> distracted and havent looked at it further.
well we really need to leave tar there since d[e]bootstrap needs it to
extract basedebs.tgz files, as well as `Report a problem' manual user
hackery, etc etc.
removing ar along i imagine would not gain very much, but then again
we need every byte we can get.
> There are no known bugs with busybox dpkg-deb, it should be stable.
i am fairly certain i saw a compiler warning about a comparision
always being true do to limited data types during my compiles, so i
would bet a nickel its broken on powerpc and any other arch where char
signedness is != i386. thats a trivial thing to fix though, ill see if
i can find it in a bit.
> Some space could be saved by using the busybox ash shell as well, its had
> the math routines put back in, and its been getting lots of attention from
> busybox developers.
that is more risky, debootstrap and the powerpc bootloader
installer/configurator are writtin in /bin/sh, so the busybox version
MUST be at least as good as real ash.
we can also save about 10 or 12k using the ash udeb as its compiled
-Os instead of -O2.
--
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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