disable features

[Lutz Jaenicke]

On Wed, Oct 24, 2001 at 10:30:51AM +0200, Markus Friedl wrote:
> this (uncomplete) patch makes various features compile time
> options and saves up to 24K in the resulting
> ssh/sshd binaries. i don't know whether this
> should be added to the CVS since it makes
> the code less readable.

Please allow me a personal comment:
OpenSSL is full of options like these (even though they are treated
the other way round: we have NO_* options to explicitly disable
features). If you ask me: it is pain in the a*. Don't do it, if
it is not really necessary for a particular reason, say patents.
Fortunately, 99% of all OpenSSL users compile without touching these
options, just on some platforms some features are not supported.
I am too lazy to check out the reducement in size and while I hate
creeping featurism, I do think that the tradeoff between size of
the executables and simplicity (and readability) of the code in this
case is not worth the hassle. It is more or less impossible to buy
harddisks below 10GB these days. (Well, I am writing this message
in front of a 10 year old HP-9000/710 with 50MHz and 64MB RAM, but
I still don't care about the 24k you mention :-)

Consider a ssh[d] that has been compiled without X11 forwarding.
Will it require a special ssh[d]_config without the X11Forwarding
keyword (because X11 forwarding is not supported and it should thus
trigger an error message if used)? It will mean that we will not only
have to ask for platforms when bugs are reported but also have to consider
that some option was (not) compiled in...
 
> perhaps WITH_COMPRESSION should be added, since
> it removes the dependency on libz
Maybe yes. However: on all platforms currently supported by OpenSSH
libz is available anyway...

Just speaking for myself,
	Lutz
-- 
Lutz Jaenicke                             Lutz.Jaenicke at aet.TU-Cottbus.DE
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