Hi again,
While our "building from source" discussion is "hot" I wondered to ask if there was an attempt or may be plans for to switch to using dynamic linking (and collect functionality within a few internal libraries) instead of static duplication of binary code across binaries.
At some point Michael Hanke and me have tried to achieve such a goal: http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-exppsy/freesurfer.git/tree/debian/patches... (although a bit also mixing up with linking against system wide libraries) so overall it is possible and should shrink currently sized at almost 4GB bin (stripped of debug symbols) into probably (forgot the size we got then) 50-100MB. I expect similar or may be even more drastic effect on debug symbols files (which are useful to provide as an option). I hope I don't need to outline why 10-fold cut down in binaries size would be a good thing ;)
So I wondered, if there are any plans, and if not (yet) -- may be we could proceed together to achieve that goal? above experiment with creating and maintaining that huge patch ourselves obviously has failed, but taking incremental steps we might succeed eventually, IFF such changes would be accepted upstream (i.e. into your code). Or do you see any possible reason why assembling few of internal dynamic libraries and linking against your libraries bundle would be a no go?
With best regards,