Re: how to make Debian less fragile (long and philosophical)
On Tue, Aug 17, 1999 at 05:41:44PM -0400, Justin Wells was heard to say:
>
> I dispute that statically linked binaries impose a large overhead for
> shell scripts.
>
> The ash shell that has been proposed for /bin/sh has echo and test
> built in for efficiency. Most of the other commands a shell runs
> are also builtins: cd, eval, exec, exit, export, for, while, do,
> pwd, read, set, shift, trap, case, and wait.
I'm more concerned about mv, ln, cp, rm[dir], and cat for starters..tar, ar,
and gzip might be problematic as well. (I didn't realize test was a builtin in
ash, that helps a lot) Assuming that these are used fairly often in shell
scripts, you're going to either take a memory hit for having all those images
loaded or have to perform extra I/O. A quick grep of lastcomm shows that while
these aren't called on a regular basis on my machine, they're often called in
quick succession within seconds or less of one another. Currently this isn't
too much of a problem; depending on how much static binaries are bloated it
might very well be (I already am chronically short on memory and I don't want to
waste any gratuitously, and yes RAM is cheap and no I can't afford it even if my
motherboard took more than an additional 16MB).
That's not to say that it isn't a good idea, but *please* make it an optional
package or put the binaries in a location where they won't be used for
normal tasks.
Daniel
--
Believe in the Great God Om or be stricken with thunderbolts?
Is that the way it always has to be?
-- Terry Pratchett, _Small Gods_
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