Samba: reduce bloat by linking dynamically

[edolstra]

Samba is insanely bloated:

$ nix-build -A samba
/nix/store/i8qvmdq9b3q38ma8w0y04jzgf32xavd2-samba-3.6.7

$ du -sch ./result/
110M    ./result/

$ ls -l ./result/bin/
total 72872
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root nixbld 1862096 Dec 31  1969 eventlogadm
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root nixbld    4641 Dec 31  1969 findsmb
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root nixbld 8219864 Dec 31  1969 net
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root nixbld 1593640 Dec 31  1969 nmblookup
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root nixbld 3070992 Dec 31  1969 ntlm_auth
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root nixbld 2024040 Dec 31  1969 pdbedit
...

The main reason seems to be that the binaries in bin and sbin are statically linked against libsmbclient and libnetapi, even though we build dynamic versions of those.

The Samba source code says:

# WORKAROUND:
#   until we have organized other internal subsystems (as util, registry
#   and smbconf) into shared libraries, we CAN NOT link libnetapi
#   dynamically to samba programs.
#
LINK_LIBNETAPI=STATIC

LINK_LIBSMBCLIENT=STATIC

so it's not clear if dynamic linking is currently safe. However, https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/24678 suggests that using Samba's alternative "waf"-based build system does the right thing. So maybe we should investigate that.

[shlevy]

@edolstra Have you had a chance to look into this yet? Do you plan to get it in before 14.04?

[vcunat]

@wkennington: any ideas about this issue? I see the size of samba is ~72MB currently, and we also have samba_light with ~113MB size (and less dependencies). I suspect that not supplying some dependencies forces samba to pack more stuff in, so it isn't really clear which is lighter (perhaps depending on other installed packages).

[wkennington]

Yeah, exactly. Light is just nicer in the sense that you have far fewer
dependencies.
On Mar 14, 2015 6:17 AM, "Vladimír Čunát" notifications@github.com wrote:

@wkennington https://github.com/wkennington: any ideas about this
issue? I see the size of samba is ~72MB currently, and we also have
samba_light with ~113MB size (and less dependencies). I suspect that not
supplying some dependencies forces samba to pack more stuff in, so it isn't
really clear which is lighter (perhaps depending on other installed
packages).

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#110 (comment).

[domenkozar]

$  du -sch $(nix-store -qR $(nix-build -A samba_light))
...
162M    /nix/store/kml4z8cdrqjdbibzzil1wzzj5vl34r2l-samba-4.2.0
447M    total

$ du -sch $(nix-store -qR $(nix-build -A samba))
...
159M    /nix/store/wykzvg6bn0mip4dir7qzpfkm56a4ikgp-samba-4.2.0
841M    total

[7c6f434c]

Samba is now 52MiB and the entire closure is 225MiB, of which 90MiB come from Python and Perl. Should this issue be closed?

[vcunat]

I do think so. Also ./result/bin/* sizes look sane now.

[vcunat]

It might still be possible to improve. I suspect many reverse dependencies use mainly the libraries, so the ~13 MB in bin/ might be nice to split, for example (half of it is due to smbtorture, too :).