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

[Pádraig Brady]

On 06/07/2014 09:37 PM, Alex Deymo wrote:
> Add the --enable-single-binary option to the configure file. When
> enabled, this option builds a single binary file with all the
> selected tools in it. Which tools gets executed depends on the value
> of argv[0] which is intended to use together with symlinks to the
> single program.
> 
> This setup reduces significantly the size of the installed binaries
> since all the redundant code from lib/libcoreutils.a installed on
> every one of the more than 100 binaries will be only once. This also
> favors the cache, since the result binary is smaller.
> 
> When installing, the makefile will create symlinks from each
> configured tool to a single "coreutils" binary installed on the
> same directory.
> 
> ---
> My tests on a x86_64 linux system show an overall decrease from
> 5.0MiB after stripping on the case of building all the binaries to
> just 924KiB with the single-binary option enabled.
> 
> I'd like to have this kind of feature in coreutils since the
> reduction in size significant. The following patch is a proposal to
> implement this feature that I used to compute the results. I'm new
> to this project so I'd love to hear some comments and work on this
> idea.

This seems like a very useful option, thanks!
Yes given that there are around 100 utils,
amalgamation like this reduces overhead significantly.

For a change this size we'd need copyright assignment though.
Does your employer already have copyright assignment to the FSF?
If not could you initiate the process?

Something like this, orthogonal to the existing coreutils logic,
would be considered for the impending coreutils 8.23 release
(hopefully cut next week), though depending on timing this
might slip to the next release.

  https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html
  http://git.sv.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/tree/doc/Copyright/request-assign.future

thanks again!
Pádraig.