Re: Coreutils binary sizes over time

[Bauke Jan Douma]

Dr. David Alan Gilbert wrote on 27-01-08 01:29:
> Hi,
>
>   Out of a bit of boredom (and avoiding trying to fix a VHDL problem)
> I decided to graph the sizes of a few of the binaries from coreutils,
> as packaged by debian over time (I've included fileutils/shellutils).
>
> At:
>
> http://www.treblig.org/pics/debianbinarysizes.png
>
> you can see a graph showing ls, du, df, true, and chmod
> over about 10 years.
>
> The raw data is here: http://www.treblig.org/data/debiansizes.csv
> All of these are the Linux/x86 binary packages and all binaries
> are ELF, stripped, with shared libs.
>
> I've not made much attempt to analyse why things are growing;
> although the fun one is the size of 'true' that used to be a tiny
> shell script.
>
> It's a bit scary that 'true' has gone from a 395 byte script to
> a 22k binary in 10 years (even the first binary version I have is
> under 5k); I can imagine that some of the other binaries probably
> have more to do with system interaction (e.g. ls gaining selinux
> support).
>
> Dave

Interesting.  It would be even more interesting if you'd mark the timestamps
for breakthrough chipset and harddrive technology and anything that's driven
by that (major POSIX changes, new filesystem types, threading [which in turn
drive GCC for example] -- any more any one?) on that graph.

bjd