setup RFC: Ditch homegrown http/ftp code and use a library?

Brian Dessent brian@dessent.net
Sat Nov 13 02:06:00 GMT 2004


Max Bowsher wrote:

> Indeed, libcurl was one which came to mind.
> I've yet to play with it, but one thing I'm a little worried about is it
> being *too* extensive - I don't want setup.exe to grow very much.
> 
> I'm certainly going to look into libcurl, but I'm open to other
> possibilities too.

Sure, that's a concern.  However current setup.exe is only ~270kb when
stripped, and even if that, say, doubled I don't see what the big deal
would be.  It seems to me that being anorexic about the .exe size at the
cost of robust net/url code is a premature optimization.

As a test I grabbed the stock 7.12.2 sources and compiled a static
libcurl.a with everything but http and ftp support disabled.  Before
stripping the file is 2.0M, after stripping it's 129k.  The
corresponding curl.exe is 163k after strip.  The only external lib that
this .exe depends on is zlib, which is in setup already, no?

Brian



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