Re: [MiNT] sources of oldstuff package

[Eero Tamminen <oak@helsinkinet.fi>]

Hi,

On Thursday 17 December 2009, Miro Kropacek wrote:
> > Because everything is linked to a single binary (and due to being
> > strictly size optimized), it could give quite a bit of disk usage
> > savings on MiNT lacking shared libs.
>
> Disk usage maybe but the loading time will be horrible. Now every tool
> would need to load ~1 MB instead of ~100 KB...

On Linux Busybox is only couple of hundred KB, I hope it wouldn't
be in megabyte size even with static linking, but it's a good point
nevertheless.

Even if MiNT doesn't support shared libraries, maybe it could
support sharing binaries in RAM (on machines having MMU)?

(I don't really know what current MiNT supports, I was using MiNT
in 90's, now I'm more of a mailing list lurker.)


> Another thing is some of 
> the most essential tools (like mentioned login, getty, init, networking
> tools like ifconfig) are hacked specially for mint -- there's some common
> basis but it's different code after all. Question is if it's still needed
> (i.e. if it's possible to take newest linux init/login/whatever and adapt
> it without too much effort or not).

Hm.  Now the distros are moving to Upstart (dependency based init
from Ubuntu).


Busybox is still nice for rescue operations as it fits onto a floppy and
provides most important tools.   First it should of course work with
MiNT though.   I was mainly wondering whether anybody has tried it...


	- Eero