Unfortunate dynamic linking for everything

[Colin Percival]

At 21:54 18/11/2003 -0500, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
 >Many freebsd users (me for one) are still living on a modem,
>where even one bump of 1.5 meg is a significant issue...
>
>Remember that the issue we're talking about is security
>updates, not full system upgrades.  "Everyone" would want
>the security updates, even if they're on a slow link.

   If people rebuild from source, the binary sizes don't affect the update 
time.  If people use FreeBSD Update -- which is the only binary security 
update tool around -- then they're using binary patches, and that 1.5MB is 
actually closer to 10 kb.
   The bandwidth usage associated with updating a system is only a concern 
for people who roll their own binary update mechanism -- and those people 
aren't likely to be doing everything over a modem.

Colin Percival