Re: Debian GNU/Hurd installation
There is support in both grub and serverboot for uncompressing gzip or
bzip2 files. So you can compress the kernel and serverboot (loaded by
GRUB), and ext2fs.static and ld.so (loaded by serverboot).
There are also the gunzip and bunzip2 store classes supported by libstore
(i.e. the filesystems such as ext2fs.static). These are read-only not
general-purpose, because they just uncompress the whole image into memory,
but just fine for a compressed filesystem image that fits on a floppy (the
assumption being that the uncompressed image will fit in memory).
Once upon a time there was a hack to gunzip shared libraries in ld.so, but
I think it has been lost and would need more hackery to get working again
anyway.
The scripts Miles wrote in the release/ dir of the hurd source tree can be
used to make minimal versions of shared libraries (these scripts probably
have some bit rot). Between that and compressing the whole root filesystem
image, and separately compressing gnumach, serverboot, ext2fs.static, and
ld.so, it might all get small enough to cope with.
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