Re: Ugly Q, I admit

On Wed, Nov 27, 2002 at 01:14:15AM -0500, Bruce Ellis wrote:
> 
> it turns out not to be very difficult at all.  i don't think much
> of it saw light.  you'll find that 5l supports it but the runtime
> code is not in the distribution.  i did 8l and el too but once
> again it never got out.  i'd be willing to do some work on this if
> come out of retirement (the pasadena doo-dah festival was more fun
> than bit-bashing).
> 
What's "el"?

I set up a NetBSD diskless workstation farm once and because /bin
and /sbin were statically linked, I felt I could save disk space
by removing their contents (mostly) and putting dynamically linked
versions in /usr/(bin sbin).

It turned out to be cheaper and simpler to use hard links instead,
only a few files in /etc needed to be kept distinct per workstation,
everything else in the root partition landed up with numerous hard
links.  The saving was considerable, although I think NetBSD seems
to have a problem with exactly 128 hard links on a single i-node
(go figure!).

The new release of NetBSD (I haven't had the nerve to lift the
bonnet lid yet) has dynamically linked everything, except the
runtime loader and, seemingly, init.

There was a long discussion about making init dynamic too, so it
could have "locale" stuff in it.  In my uneducated state, I decided
that the kernel should not support internationalisation at all,
seeing the type of confusion and cost it gives rise to.  Leave it
to applications to battle with the details.  But of course I'm just
being reactionary.

Just a few tidbits triggered by brucee's comments, I don't believe
my opinions in this matter should be given much weight, whereas
NetBSD's experiences might be worth learning from.

++L