[haiku-development] Re: A modest (FatELF) proposal

  • From: Stephan Aßmus <superstippi@xxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2012 22:55:32 +0100

Hi Landon,

thank you for the in-depth proposal. On one hand, I think that package 
management cannot solve the same problem, since package management is not 
guaranteed to be the only means by which software arrives on a system. So it 
would be great if the system technically supported FatELF. On the other hand, I 
think you totally downplay the main argument against: The increase in size of 
apps. If an application is fleshed out more and more, with extensive 
documentation, and if it contains lots of pre-rendered graphics, especially now 
on Mac OS where apps should include high-res versions of the graphics that are 
roughly 4 times the size alongside the normal versions, your argument about 
code size versus size of resources sounds about right. On Haiku however, apps 
usually have a lot less resources, the main chunk is indeed the code. And each 
additional architecture increases that size one more time.

So I would prefer a system distribution that itself ships containing only code 
for one architecture, but supports picking that architecture out of a FatELF 
binary, should it encounter one. Same with packages. I would prefer if packages 
would exist for each architecture, but that they can optionally include (and 
declare to contain) FatELF binaries.

Don't know if I thought this through. Just trying to point out that the size 
increase is indeed a problem I would want to avoid, or at least not have by 
default.

Best regards,
-Stephan


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