Doing it for the kids, man [LWN.net]

Doing it for the kids, man

Posted Oct 28, 2006 5:20 UTC (Sat) by Tara_Li (subscriber, #26706)
In reply to: Doing it for the kids, man by dcoutts
Parent article: Doing it for the kids, man: Children's laptop inspires open source projects (LinuxWorld)

My point as regards to the languages was more that you end up with a multiplicity of languages required for a minimal installation. As it stands with Red Hat and Fedora - you pretty much *HAVE* to install Perl and Python both. And Java is starting to make a showing. Soon we'll have Mono required, and who knows what else.

Let's get some simplification going on - so that if I have Avahi turned off, and Kerberos - the libraries never even get *LOADED* on my aps. I mean, really - why does my CPU Freq monitor applet on the Gnome panel require access to Avahi, libasound (there's no way to configure it to beep when the CPU freq changes that *I've* been able to find), libesd, libcrypto, libkrb5, and a whole crapload of similar stuff - sure, it's all shared - but I can't figure out which of my aps might be using it, especially the Kerberos crap.

Sometimes, I wonder if I might not be better off actually statically building all of the aps on my system.

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Doing it for the kids, man

Posted Oct 28, 2006 18:46 UTC (Sat) by dberkholz (subscriber, #23346) [Link]

You could use a source-based distribution that lets you avoid all those unneeded dependencies, such as Gentoo..

Doing it for the kids, man

Posted Oct 28, 2006 22:54 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Definitely don't link statically! As it is, those libraries interfacing to
things you don't use have only one copy in memory across all apps, and
even *that* is probably not paged in if you're not using it. Compile it
statically, and you'll have functions from those libraries scattered among
functions that *are* being used, *and* duplicated in every user. It's
hugely more expensive.

Doing it for the kids, man

Posted Nov 2, 2006 5:31 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Unfortunately, we don't have a good tool for reporting memory usage. The ones that we have don't properly show the benefits of shared libraries, so people don't see the benefits of dynamic linking.