*BSD News Article 4870


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!hp9000.csc.cuhk.hk!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!caen!spool.mu.edu!wupost!csus.edu!netcom.com!hasty
From: hasty@netcom.com (Amancio Hasty Jr)
Subject: Re: which X386 in agate is better?
Message-ID: <rvvn8+b.hasty@netcom.com>
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 92 17:30:31 GMT
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services  (408 241-9760 guest) 
References: <sxsnztn.hasty@netcom.com> <1992Sep9.211847.10985@menudo.uh.edu> <EICHIN.92Sep11043000@tsx-11.mit.edu>
Lines: 40

In article <EICHIN.92Sep11043000@tsx-11.mit.edu> eichin@athena.mit.edu (Mark W. Eichin) writes:
>> Is there any archive site which has 'stripped' X11 binaries ?
>> Downloading 12M bytes of X386 server only (even though it is compressed)
>> does not make sense to me since I'll never debug X386 server.
>	Since I run at the end of a SLIP line (38,400 wire, but still
>not ethernet) and I've mostly filled a 200M disk, I wanted a smaller
>release for a lot of reasons... there are two things I've done that
>you might find helpful (that I'd also like to see in any future X
>binary release):
>	1) strip all binaries. If I care, I'll build with symbols. If
>*you* care, write a version of "pirts" and keep the symbols yourself.
>[pirts is a reverse strip, I've seen a few people write them under BSD
>-- it takes the symbols and puts them in a different file. Then, when
>debugging something, you should be able to tell gdb "symbol-file
>foo.syms" and have it look there instead of in the exec-file...]
>	2) compress all the fonts. The X11R5 has inline code to
>uncompress them on the fly... all you have to do with the current
>release is remember to delete fonts.dir and run mkfontdir again in
>each of the font directories (75dpi, 100dpi, misc.) I haven't noticed
>any performance difference.
>	My current installation only uses 40M (compressing the fonts
>saves 6M by itself; stripping X386 saves over 10M...) and has *all* of
>the user-level functionality of the original release...
>				_Mark_ <eichin@athena.mit.edu>
>				MIT Student Information Processing Board
>				Cygnus Support <eichin@cygnus.com>
>ps. Above numbers using the agate:ports... version of Xfree86, not the
>one in pub/incoming.

The version in agate:/pub/incoming was built without "-g",
for instance, the size of the server is about 900,000 bytes and 
that is uncompressed!

Hope this helps,
Amancio Hasty