a few short observations on latest BB

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Wed, 1 Mar 2006, Bernhard Fischer wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 09:54:36AM -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> >On Wed, 1 Mar 2006, Bernhard Fischer wrote:
> >
> >> On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 05:19:00AM -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> >
> >> >  next, there doesn't appear to be any difference in either selecting
> >> >or not selecting "Feature-complete libbusybox".  both generated shared
> >> >lib files that turn out to be exactly the same size.  the only
> >>
> >> in libbb/Makefile.in, see
> >> # conditionally compiled objects:
> >>
> >> >difference is that selecting the full featured library creates an
> >> >extra hard link in the install directory but that's it.  based on the
> >>
> >> There should be no difference for the installation between the full- and
> >> not full .so
> >>
> >> >help message, that's not what i expected.  what difference *should* i
> >> >have seen?
> >>
> >> Right now, you'll only see a small difference and only if you didn't
> >> select any of the "conditionally compiled" applets. This will hopefully
> >> change in the future.
>
> >ok, so "full feature" doesn't *really* mean full feature.  that
> >definitely explains things.  thanks.
>
> Perhaps i misunderstand you above..
> "full feature" means to disregard the actual selected applets (resp.
> their dependencies) and to just put libbb/*.c into libbusybox.
> So: "full feature" == everything

  i'm still unclear on what you're saying here, so let me give you an
example.  i took a clean BB source tree and did the following:

  $ make allnoconfig
  $ make menuconfig

and additionally selected to build a shared busybox library.  given
that i selected as little as possible, i would have guessed that the
resulting shared lib would be fairly small, right?  and it's size was,
in fact, 52424 bytes.

  at that point, i reconfigured the build to be "feature complete" and
the resulting shared lib was *exactly* the same size.

  finally, i did

  $ make allbareconfig

and rebuilt the shared lib *without* "feature complete", at which
point that library was 130380 bytes, the same size as when i then
rebuilt *with* "feature complete."

  i'm willing to believe that i just don't understand what the
selection of "feature complete" means but, whatever it means, it
clearly doesn't mean what it would lead someone to believe.

rday