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Projeto-Pindorama / heirloom-ng

A collection of standard Unix utilities that is intended to provide maximum compatibility with traditional Unix while incorporating additional features necessary today.
http://heirloom-ng.pindorama.net.br
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{Q] Are single binary releases possibe/planned? à la Busybox #42

Closed xplshn closed 7 months ago

takusuman commented 7 months ago

Never planned this, I do not think it would even be technically possible with this code base. I think the maximum that can be achieved is to link the programs dynamically and strip the binaries to have the smallest size possible; otherwise, depending on the system, it would be preferable to use BeastieBox --- long forgotten, I do not know if it is still maintained --- or the more popular ToyBox as BusyBox alternatives. If you would like to combine the classical UNIX usage with the Beastie/Busy/ToyBox minimalism for an embedded system, maybe reworking UNIXv7 tools --- liberated and open source'd per a BSD-style licence --- as a single-binary-capable package could be an interesting project.

Addendum: just to not discourage you completely, apparently there is a tool to "crunch" binaries together in one single entity, it was made by some BSD folks back in 1994. I'm preoccupied that this is broken in modern systems and/or it does not work as we're thinking it does. Reference of a Linux port: https://github.com/ryao/crunch

xplshn commented 7 months ago

U-Root does what Crunch does with this; https://github.com/u-root/gobusybox

It is maintained, and it works well enough, maybe a Makefile target for this functionality based on gobuybox?

takusuman commented 7 months ago

It is maintained, and it works well enough, maybe a Makefile target for this functionality based on gobuybox?

It can be a nice experiment, but I'm busy with some subjects recently to implement and test this per myself, so I think I could not help some time soon. But I can not lie that it is an interesting idea.

xplshn commented 7 months ago

Okay, thanks. Marking this as closed.

takusuman commented 7 months ago

No problem. When I get some of my time free, I will take a look at this.