RE: [Lynx-dev] Making a very small Lynx executable?

[Thomas Dickey]

On Mon, 19 Dec 2005, Small, Gene wrote:

> Thomas,
>
> Thanks. I looked at this and it did not seem at first glance that
> limiting the character set support would save significantly. I'm looking
> to embedded lynx on a zipit wireless device which has very limited
> flash. Lynx runs fine if it is copied down after boot or run from an NFS
> mount. I wanted to squeeze it into the initrd so it would be there on
> boot. I'll look into other options.

It might be possible to compress the image and run from that (though I
have no idea how you'd embed that).

Anyway just for numbers, I compiled three copies of lynx.  One just
uses the configure script defaults, one turns off everything that has
a "--disable" in the configure --help message, and one uses the defaults
but uses the --with-charsets=no option:

> size lynx-normal lynx-minimal-charsets lynx-disable
   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
1125609   91876  129320 1346805  148cf5 lynx-normal
1086265   60260  129320 1275845  1377c5 lynx-minimal-charsets
 794977   82268  119752  996997   f3685 lynx-disable

The column for "dec" is a little bigger than the filesize:

> ls -l lynx-normal lynx-minimal-charsets lynx-disable
-r-xr-xr-x  1 tom users  962665 Dec 19 15:46 lynx-disable
-rwxr-xr-x  1 tom users 1238757 Dec 19 15:50 lynx-minimal-charsets
-r-xr-xr-x  1 tom users 1315320 Dec 19 15:42 lynx-normal

Finally, if I combine the --disable's and the --with:

-rwxr-xr-x   1 tom        884574 Mon 15:58:04   lynx

So (without tinkering with the --without's), I can reduce it by 33%.

That's with ncurses (dynamically linked).  Prior conversation on this
stated that building with slang would be smaller - that is (sort of)
still true (doesn't take into account the fact that the slang shared
library is twice as big as ncurses):

-rwxr-xr-x   1 tom        860093 Mon 16:05:21   lynx*

Either way, the result runs, but is lacking some functionality that
you would normally expect (I just tried looking at the bookmark file,
and the last executable complained about nesting of html).

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net