Re: lynx-dev Compiling Lynx with libwww as a shared library

[Mike Castle]

Amazingly enough Webmaster Jim said:
> I found an old copy of Lynx for Digital/Alpha that had libwww
> as a shared object, and also this reference to building it:
> http://www.flora.org/lynx-dev/lynx-dev/9608/0024.html
> 
> I don't see such a switch in the configure script. How easy would it be
> to put this option in to the build process?


Why would you want to do this?  It really wouldn't gain you anything; and
actually would probably cost you some.

The libwww that Lynx uses is rather old, and has been hacked much to
support things over the years.  It would probably work with no application
other than Lynx.

As new releases of Lynx comes out, it's not too suprising to find changes
under the libwww dirs as well as the regular Lynx src (especially when Fote
was at work I think! :-).  As a result, building a shared libwww once and
building subsequent versions of lynx against it would probably fail sooner
than later.

Using a shared library in this instance would probably slow down start up
time and possibly increase the memory usage a slight bit (to cover the
overhead having to load another shared library). 

There would be no memory savings from running multiple copies of lynx on
the same machine against a shared library providing everyone is running the
same binary (ie, ones located in /usr/local/bin or something).  And if
people are running their own local copies of Lynx, they probably are
running different versions, which mean they should really have different
libwww's as well.

Now, while it would be a pretty nifty exercise in learning how to use
shared libraries, it would not have any real practical purpose.

mrc
-- 
       Mike Castle       Life is like a clock:  You can work constantly
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