Disk space (was: SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure)

The size, btw, is probably because the gnulib folks have found bugs in printf which the glibc folks refuse to fix (they only cause buffer overruns or bus errors on invalid input, after all, how problematic could that be?) so GNU software that uses gnulib will automatically replace glibc's printf with gnulib's at configure time. (That this happens even for things like /bin/true, which will never print the class of things that triggers the glibc printf bugs, is a flaw, but not a huge one.)

And gnulib, because it has no stable API or ABI, is always statically linked to its users.

26Kb for a printf implementation isn't bad.