Re: a minimal www build for CVS import

In our previous episode, Steinar Bang said:
> 
> I would like to put what I need to build libwww itself there, and
> strip away all examples, documentation, and source code for a platform
> I will never use (ie. vms), to minimize the network usage and disk
> usage of a checked out workspace.  Say 3.3MB would be better than the
> 8.4MB of the entire checked out CVS tree.

I made something similar for Amaya. I CVS tagged the parts of libwww that
Amaya uses and removed the examples, doc, and other libwww applications.

> But trying to strip down libwww raises some questions:
>  1. does winConfigure.pl create platform specific header files?

No. You'll need to patch your Makefile though. There's a line there
that checks if the .h files should be generated. It'll be better to remove
it.

>  2. are any platform specific -D flags created by winConfigure.pl?  If
>     so: which files do they come from and where do they go (which .h
>     files)?

No -D flags.

>  3. Could/should I remove the ~500kB of prebuilt .dll and .lib files
>     and build them myself?  (We already have a multiplatform makefile
>     setup, using Troll Tech's tmake
>         http://www.troll.no/announce/tmake-13.html
>     )

Yes. We do that in the Amaya Windows version.

>  4. Should I build the entire library as one .so (as tmake would
>     prefer for source in a single directory)?  Or should I try to use
>     some hack makefiles that would run the native libwww make setup? 

It all depends on your application. If you have many libwww applications,
it makes sense to have DLLs rather than static libs. If compiling a big
libwww takes too much time, it may make more sense to have more mini
libwww's. There are other issues about how much of a library is loaded into
memory when the application is running (Unfortunately, I don't remember what's
the exact issue).

In the case of Amaya Windows, I made a new Makefile and we use a single .so.
You can try downloading a dsp file from the Amaya CVS repository (same one
as the libwww, under Amaya/Windows/), to get an idea.

So, in summary, it's possible to do what you have in mind. Bear in mind that
moving slightly from what's in the CVS repository will complicate a bit
your CVS updates. E.g., you'll have to remember to generate the .h files
each time, resolve conflicts in the Makefile, ...

Hope this helps,

-Jose

Received on Thursday, 2 September 1999 10:56:36 UTC