On Mon, Jul 26, 2021 at 12:36 PM mayur...@kathe.in <mayur...@kathe.in> wrote:
> cross-posting since i accidentally addressed this one to omnios-discuss > the first time. sorry. > > i have noticed a trend amongst communities oriented towards building open > source unix-like operating systems; the project starts off as being quite > lean, but then acquires a lot of fat due to dependence on the non-core > toolkit. > The size of what you deliver depends on the uses to which it's put. The OS itself is pretty lean (you can boot from a ~10MB ISO into a 48MB RAM VM if you put your mind to it). You can strip any image down, but if you want to get below about 200M (for an ISO or an installation) then you're going to remove functionality or hardware support. At which point the artefact you ship is going to be unusable by some fraction of your userbase. It's easier just to stop at that point and ship something that's useful for the majority. > from the illumos perspective, i would say, "core" would be the kernel + > userland, all written using a combination of ansi-c and the system default > shell (korn). > > afaik, 'ips' is built using python which supposedly coordinates between > minisat (written in ansi-c), the userland and some mechanism to get files > off the network. > i am not yet clear about how 'ips' works, and i am working at overcoming > that by consulting "till wegmueller" who has written a couple of > implementations of 'ips' using different programming languages (it think; > go and rust), but, it would be worthwhile to get a broader input from those > in the community who were from "sun microsystems" as to why python was > chosen over ksh93. > IPS isn't part of illumos, and while some distributions use it, there are others that don't. > also, after an email thread on omnios-disucss, it has been revealed that > there are a bunch of tools on the base system which depend of 'gnu' bash, > is there any way that could be rectified? or is that issue only within > omnios and not addressable by the illumos community at large? > bash is quite ubiquitous in the open source world; large parts of the ecosystem (often unintentionally) require bash. Could be fixed, but it's an ongoing maintenance burden so it's easier not to bother. The vast majority of potential users probably want bash, so you want it anyway and it's not adding excess weight. > is there any way the illumos community could get interested in shedding > it's fat even at the userland level? > There isn't actually a great deal of fat. Tribblix strips a little bit, but I'm well into diminishing returns at this point. -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/ ------------------------------------------ illumos: illumos-discuss Permalink: https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/T8b661f3611aef44c-M7da4f90784763313687803b1 Delivery options: https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription
