What's the problem again? [LWN.net]

What's the problem again?

Posted Oct 29, 2009 14:31 UTC (Thu) by alex (subscriber, #1355)
Parent article: FatELF: universal binaries for Linux

I struggle to understand the use case, especially for software I get from my distro repo. I know the disk usage isn't a major component but it still seems wasteful to have a bunch of unused code lying around on those platters.

However a Fat${PKG} format might be be more inline with the implied use case of distributing 3rd party applications.

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What's the problem again?

Posted Oct 29, 2009 17:14 UTC (Thu) by mrshiny (guest, #4266) [Link]

I agree. It seems to me that many use-cases for this technology fail on a typical Linux system because of the way software is normally distributed.

However, for multi-arch systems this might be useful, and I suppose that in the days when I had a mix of architectures it would have been nice to be able to install FatElf software to a shared network drive and have it just work. Plus for installers this sort of thing could be handy. But since most software that I install comes from a repository, a fat package would work just as well as fat binaries.