This is because 5.0 compiles the internal GRASS libraries statically by
default. So does 5.3, but if you add the configure options
'--enable-gmake=no --enable-shared=yes' in 5.3 then it will compile with
shared libraries and be a lot smaller.
Note than you can/should also run make strip in 5.0 and 5.3 after compiling
to strip debugging symbols from the executable files (or you can pass CFLAGS
to the configure script to stop debugging symbols being added, if you know
what you're doing).
The files in grass5/bin are all hardlinks to the same file so they don't take
up any extra space. The files in etc/bin/cmd and etc/bin/inter can all be
stripped.
It should be probably around 100MB after stripping, depending on your
platform. But if you try shared libraries in 5.3 it will be much smaller
still.
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