Coreutils binary sizes over time

[Dr. David Alan Gilbert]

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

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