Re: RFC: [PATCH] build: Option for building all tools in a single binary

[Alex Deymo]

On Mon, Jun 9, 2014 at 9:56 AM, Pádraig Brady <address@hidden> wrote:
> One thing I was wondering about in addition to the
> other items in this thread was setting the external command name,
> with setproctitle() or prctl(PR_SET_NAME) on Linux,
> or maybe we could reexec to set this?

In general, since the "make install" step install symlinks to the
single coreutils binary, you don't need to change the command name
when running the program if you call it as usual "ls foo". There's
another way to call the same code (coreutils ls foo), and we could
change the command name on that case, but I'm not sure if makes sense.
You might have a reason to call coreutils directly and not the
symlinks.


Regarding the shared libraries, yes, that's the downside of having a
single binary. There are not that many libs (rt and pthreads here),
and since the dynamic linking is lazy after you run the first command
the libs will be cached. I think that the overall disk (and thus
memory) reduction is worth it, but since that depends on your context
I'm proposing this as a config flag disabled by default.