On Fri, 25 Jun 2004, Andreas Metzler wrote:
> > Exim ALWAYS links against its own pcre library, and Philip also suggests
> > that.
>
> I *think* the last recent remark of Phil on this issue was different,
> but I might mix things up.
No, I haven't changed anything. Exim links against its own internal
version. This was done originally when libpcre was new and not widely
installed (indeed, not installed anywhere). There might be a case for
changing it nowadays, but it is true that the Exim version is indeed
stripped down.
Another reason was that I didn't want people to have to install a lot of
stuff before they could install Exim. At the time, I hadn't realized
that many then current distributions didn't have DBM libraries. Later,
of course, more requirements such as TLS were added, but for a basic
Exim, it is still true that the only thing you need is a DBM library.
The size of pcre.o for Exim on my Linux box is 45140. This is not large...
The size of a more general pcre.o, with UTF-8 support, is 61612. The
size of the next release will be around 70/80K, or double that if you want
Unicode property support [because of the property table].
Regards,
Philip
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
