Matthew Orgass wrote:
>   It seems wrong that the combined mount is the largest binary in /sbin or
> /bin, larger then dhclient and the shells, although this is mostly libc's
> fault.  It would probably be worthwile to put umount in the same binary,
> since it should use the same libc functions.

It not so on my i386:
> ls -l /sbin/mount /bin/sh /bin/ksh /sbin/dhclient /bin/csh

-r-xr-xr-x   1 root  wheel  352616 Sep 27 10:41 /bin/csh*
-r-xr-xr-x   1 root  wheel  396508 Sep 27 10:41 /bin/ksh*
-r-xr-xr-x   1 root  wheel  458576 Sep 27 10:41 /bin/sh*
-r-xr-xr-x   1 root  wheel  442444 Sep 27 10:55 /sbin/dhclient*
-r-xr-xr-x  18 root  wheel  295956 Oct 30 22:05 /sbin/mount*

The largest binary within /sbin and /bin is definitely /bin/sh for me.

>   Why would you want to replace mount_foo?

Testing or whatever - I needed to replace system binaries with a script couple
of times on some systems (either when debugging something or because
I needed to force some usage), for example.

>   It isn't really needed, but is cleaner if you want to do anything more
> then just pass the result to the user.  With a separate binary you need to
> interpret the result, while libraries are forced to have public
> interfaces.  Further, libraries are versioned so you can at least get an
> error message when what you are expecting has been changed.

Yes, though the advantages of library are typically worth the necessary
efford only when the involved code is used on more than only one place :)

Jaromir
-- 
Jaromir Dolecek <jdolecek@NetBSD.org>      http://www.ics.muni.cz/~dolecek/
@@@@  Wanna a real operating system ? Go and get NetBSD, damn!  @@@@