On Mon, 29 Dec 1997, Jonathan Stone wrote:

.. I agree with Jason, but it's worth noting that the bloat for `doing
.. more' can be nontrivial.  I seem to remember a growth of 60%-100% in
.. statically-linked binaries in /{bin,sbin} when the pmax switched from
.. a.out to ELF.  Other architectures may be less bloated.  But if it
.. means growing your root partition, then thats something more the
.. installation tools needs to support :-).

Hey Jonathan, I know that you did the work, but anyway: wasn't the
increase in size of /{s,}bin noticed when you changed the pmax from
running elf without any notion of shared libraries to elf with
shared libraries (because you wanted to be able to use the same
libraries for static as well as for dynamic linking)?

But the concern remains valid: forcing people to repartition their disks
(if this will actually be the case) should not be done without careful
planning -- possibly over two releases where the first release would
encourage people to re-partition, but leave the change actually requiring
the increased size of / to the next release.

Another tidbit of information is that the pmax port (and possibly one or
two other ports) already use current (2.8.1) binutils, because they
must use elf.

- Erik Bertelsen