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That's very interesting. I would love for someone to dig deeper into this.

What happens if you do a multistage build (to get rid of the build tools once you don't need them) and compile Postgres from source on Alpine and Bionic?

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Consider how dope it'd be to ~"tree-shake" packages based on config files, if doing immutable infrastructure. Basically, only compile / include the features of the services you run based on what's required by the config files. I'm sure that this is a complex problem, but it shouldn't be impossible to mostly / fully automate.

This is brilliant. You'd need to basically define every single compile-time param and then have your build process emit a customized binary (and retinue of supporting stuffs) that does just that and nothing else.

Probably makes your total build time significantly longer; you'd need aggressive caching based on the feature flag set.

This is mostly how gentoo works. You define global settings, like "gui" or "pulseaudio", and you also have per package features to enable or disable. After setting these up, when you install a package, it is installed using only the features you enabled, so you have a lot of control over what and how you make your system work.

So Gentoo? I think E-Trade may still use it in production.

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