Re: Building a subset of coreutils

[Eric Blake]

On 05/13/2013 12:41 PM, Paul Moore wrote:
> I'm taking my first steps at building coreutils from scratch, and I'm
> interested in how I would limit the build to a subset of the full list of
> tools. From my investigations, it seems to me that I can modify
> build-aux/gen-lists-of-programs.sh to limit the list of tools that get
> built - but that does not seem to remove the unneeded parts of gnulib. It
> looks like I can remove the parts of gnulib that I don't need by modifying
> bootstrap.conf.
> 
> However, short of manually analysing each of the tools that I include, I
> don't see a way of determining which gnulib functions can be omitted - i.e.
> a list of which tools use which gnulib facilities.
> 
> As an example, if I *just* wanted to build numfmt, sort, and date, how
> would I establish what to include?

I would just let gnulib do its thing.  It's built as a static library,
so even though you spend more time than necessary building files that
aren't used in the subset of executables you want, you aren't bloating
your resulting binaries any.  Furthermore, gnulib tries to build as
little as possible; if you have an up-to-date GNU/Linux system, there's
already quite a few source files of gnulib that aren't even built
because you have no bugs to be worked around in the first place.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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