Can you Shrink glibc?

alterity asks: "I want to roll my own root/boot rescue disk. So far so good - I have created a root/boot disk that works with the latest stable kernel and glibc(2.1). I have saved space using busybox and asmutils. But the biggest dead-weight of space is the the size of the glibc library - a touch over one meg. I notice that the Debian distribution has a much reduced glibc library under 400k in size. Does anyone know how they do it and what can be excised from glibc for this purpose?" Shrinking critical libraries is always good thing.