Clarification on a few points

Posted Jan 31, 2012 18:10 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: Clarification on a few points by tbird20d
Parent article: Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

You could instead add a --dump-source option to busybox which prints the complete source code to stdout. This code would be baked into the executable during the build process and so always up to date. Vendors could ship the binary executable of busybox without worries.

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Clarification on a few points

Posted Jan 31, 2012 23:24 UTC (Tue) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] (2 responses)

The source code to busybox, as a compressed tarball, is bigger than the binary of busybox. Since small size is one of the major design criteria in embedded software...

Clarification on a few points

Posted Feb 1, 2012 10:20 UTC (Wed) by rvfh (guest, #31018) [Link]

Yeah, but memory usage is the main issue these days, not hard-disk usage, so there would be a way to have the source code ready to be grabbed but never loaded into memory.

When there is a will, there is a way :-)

Clarification on a few points

Posted Feb 1, 2012 11:18 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

About 1.6 megabytes compressed with lrzip -z. Add a bit more for the decompression code and it comfortably fits in two megabytes, which is not expensive given current flash memory prices.