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interesting competition

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hiro:
http://morpheus.2f30.org/

It shares quite some concepts with tinycorelinux.
Like tc they have a curious way of doing package management (aufs).
Haven't tried it yet, but it's for sure inspirational.

Lee:
Sounds interesting, but it says "Package management using mount overlays (aufs)", and that scared me off.  No more union fs for me.

bmarkus:
Statically linked apps are not my favourite either.

hiro:

--- Quote from: Lee on May 02, 2014, 02:49:15 AM ---Sounds interesting, but it says "Package management using mount overlays (aufs)", and that scared me off.  No more union fs for me.

--- End quote ---

Package management is always scary, I know tinycore decided back then that the unionfs route would be too complicated. But I'd be happy for the morpheus people if they can utilize it in a stable way. I wonder also if in practice there are other benefits over linking.


About statically linked apps I think you should read their justifications and look at how well it works in plan9 (look at how fast the whole OS compiles and how small the binaries are. also where union directories make name space seperation work which amongst many other things allows you to make very simple and useful security abstractions, also I like how it completely eliminates any need for PATH environment variables, as bins just get bound into the one and only /bin)

I'm probably not the best to explain any of these concepts so he're some pointers, I really enjoyed reading this stuff:

http://man2.aiju.de/1/intro (i.e. grep for union dir in the name spaces section)
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/names.html
http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20090525150626/http://blog.garbe.us/2008/02/08/01_Static_linking/

bmarkus:
There is a room for statically linked applications. I see benefits for example on Windows to have a portable application which can be used over wide range of Windows versions, do not require stupid installation program, etc.  Where I can can me mostly sure, it will work at a customer (end user). This can work on Linux too, including closed source (commercial) applications. Take Go, it creates statically linked executable.

However on the system side it can be a nightmare. Imagine a security bug for example in your SSH library. When you have a fix in shared lib environment, you must update just the SSH library. In a statically linked you must rebuild all apps using it. Also using shared libs significantly reduce the overall system size.

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