[RULE] uClibc versus glibc and packaging

[M. Fioretti]

On Mon, Jan 20, 2003 18:09:40 at 06:09:40PM -0500, Fratoni Michael (mfratoni at tuxfan.homeip.net) wrote:
> 
> I've been fooling around for the past week or so with rebuilding the Red 
> Hat provided rpms to reduce dependencies. I've also been experimenting 
> with building the modified packages against uClibc. The size difference 
> is quite impressive. Of course, not all packages build against the 
> smaller C library. But I'd like to see just how useful a system I can 
> build without adding glibc.
> 
> Doing this has been an interesting learning experience, though I don't 
> know that it has much real world usefulness.
> 
I think that it could have more than you seem to imagine. Yes,
probably it is impossible to build a fully functional desktop (in the
RULE sense of the world, i.e. all meat, no eye candy) without using
both libraries, but *if* they can coexist, and the leanest ones makes
leaner and faster, for example, 80% of programs, this still means that
you can fit more stuff in less disk space and RAM and use it
simultaneously, doesn't it? Or am I missing something obvious? If yes,
please explain without embarassing me too much...

Frankly, the part that worries me more in this context is maintenance,
and if 3rd party RPMs would continue to be useable in a RULE system.

How much can you call Red Hat (technically, not legally of course)
compatible something without glibc?

I'm not dismissing it, of course, all the contrary. It still makes a
wonderful hack (man, I **must** get some sick days and start trowing out
RPMs myself, once and for all...) and a definite life saver for a lot
of hardware otherwise unuseable. I am only noting that we should be
prepared, at least in the long run, to the effort that this implies.
Myself, I'll be really happy to learn how to do it step by step.

Last but not least: as I've said several times, <32 MB of RAM means
two very different things nowadays. It can be either a junkyard PC, or
a state of the art PDA. I'll try to contact somebody at
www.handhelds.org next week, to check which know-how we could
exchange.

	Ciao,
		Marco Fioretti
-- 
Marco Fioretti                 m.fioretti, at the server inwind.it
Red Hat for low memory         http://www.rule-project.org/en/

There are tasks that cannot be done by more than ten men, or less than
one hundred


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