stand-alone, but static linked applets

[Rich Felker]

On Fri, Nov 09, 2012 at 05:38:36PM +0100, John Spencer wrote:
> i noticed that the busybox binary is quite big, and i think you have
> to actually use *a lot* of applets at the same time to accomodate
> its memory usage.

There's no reason the whole busybox binary needs to be loaded into
memory; only the pages that are read/executed will actually be
resident.

> another advantage of separate binaries is that you can set suid root
> on only the few that actually need it.

This is a much better reason to want standalone versions of some of
the utilities, but you could also attain this behavior with tiny suid
wrapper executables that just exec busybox with the appropriate first
argument.

> in the busybox menuconfig, i only found an option to build libbb
> shared, which offers the possibility to make standalone programs.
> 
> is there such an option for static linking as well that i may have missed ?

Nonetheless, this would be a nice option.

Rich