Re: Size of coreutils binaries

leledumbo wrote:
> I added coreutils to my msys installation because I need some tools not
> available in the installer. However, the size of each binary is at least 1
> MB. Why is it so? I don't think a program as simple as pwd could have such
> size.

It's because coreutils are now built with i18n support, to support our
non-english-speaking users. Normally, i18n support would be provided by
the libintl DLL -- but on MSYS, because we're still stuck using
gcc-2.95.3, libintl can only be built as a static library (the reason
for this limitation is long and involved).

Now, this means that each and every coreutils app must link in the
libintl code statically -- and that's why they are all much bigger than
before.

Eventually, when the MSYS compiler is updated to be 3.x or 4.x, we will
be able to compile libintl as a DLL, and then the coreutils apps will
drop back down to a more reasonable size.

For now, tho, I figure (a) disk space is cheap, (b) supporting
non-english-speaking users is important, and (c) the download tarball is
actually not much bigger than before, because the repeated libintl
static code compresses very well.

BTW, the MSYS Phoenix project is already using a version of gcc-3.4.x to
build msys apps, and they also have an experimental gcc-4.x version (but
it has no C++ support).  AFTER mingw-get is rolled out, and the "new"
modularized MSYS/MinGW distribution has some time to stabilize, I'll
look into grabbing the MSYS Phoenix compiler -- but doing so would
require recompiling and updating ALL of the MSYS packages (not to
mention some significant changes wrt gettext/libintl and libiconv). I'm
definitely not ready to tackle that just yet.

--
Chuck


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