On Mon, 16 Aug 1999, Jason Gunthorpe wrote: > "The smallest GLIBC static binary is 200k and that number seems to double > every release!"
Let's say you would be adding 200K per system binary. Justin had a list of 26 binaries. That would be an extra 5MB of total disk space used up. The entire contents of /bin and /sbin on a minimal slink machine I have access to has 138 binaries, which would mean a 27MB increase. It's nothing to sneeze at, sure, but this is worst-case and includes binaries that don't need to be static. The benefits, meanwhile, from a reliability and recoverability standpoint, are substantial. If we were worried about base.tgz getting too large, base.tgz could contain the same binaries as now, but they could get upgraded at dselect time by having the system packages on the main site (with higher version numbers) contain statically-linked binaries. Or, alternatively, there's /stand. In any case, it seems worthwhile.
