?

    llamacpp> ls -l \*llama\*
    -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2505480 Aug  7 05:06 libllama.so
    -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5092024 Aug  7 05:23 llama-server

That's a terrible excuse, Llama.cpp is just 7.5 megabytes. You can easily ship a couple copies of that. The current ollama for windows download is 700MB.

I don't buy it. They're not willing to make an 700MB download a few megabytes bigger to ~730MB, but they are willing to support a fork/rewrite indefinitely (and the fork is outside of their core competency, as seen by the current issues)? What kind of decisionmaking is that?

Sorry, I forgot to include in my comment this part:

If you include multiple version of llama, and each of those llama version depends on different GPU libraries, that could balloon the download size.

If these GPU libraries change rarely, then yes, you are correct, it might not be a problem.

Well llama.cpp requires minimum CUDA 11 from 2020, or if you need CUDA C++17 support, then CUDA 12 from 2022.

It'll compile fine against latest CUDA 12.8 or 12.9 etc, but there's zero need to pack whatever the latest CUDA version is.

It’s 700mib because they’re likely redistributing the CUDA libraries so that users don’t need to separately run that installer. Llama.cpp is a bit more “you are expected to know what you’re doing” on that front. But yeah, you could plausibly ship multiple versions of the inference engine although from a maintenance perspective that sounds like hell for any number of reasons