Hi,
the last two issues that I'm facing with cyrus-imapd are not strictly
related to buildroot, nor to cross-compilation, but rather to using
cyrus-imapd in an embedded system.
I'm discussing them together in this e-mail as they are closely related.
The cyrus-imapd build system apparently does not currently allow to
build shared executables. This results in needlessly large files.
In a basic build for x86 (./configure && make), most of the executables
in imap/ have a size between 2.2 and 2.5 MB, and the sum is 62.8 MB.
This may not be a problem on a classic mail server, but storage space
can be a precious resource on embedded systems.
Clearly, using shared libraries would reduce the overall space required.
It looks like I'm not the first to think about this. In
http://bugzilla.cyrusimap.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3095
a patch was proposed and rejected. Unfortunately I could not apply it,
possibly because it's based on an old code base (2008).
Would it be feasible to add shared build support in the cyrus-imapd
build system?
For the same motivation (saving precious storage space), it would be
extremely useful to disable the compilation and installation of selected
executables.
The standard distribution installed as many as 30 executables in
/usr/cyrus/bin/, which cross-compiled for ARM and stripped take 32 MB.
Those that I really need take <7 MB and I wish I could get rid of them
by passing --disable-pop3proxyd or similar to ./configure.
AFAIK this is not currently possible in cyrus-imapd. Is this correct?
Do the Cyrus developers have anything similar in mind for the future of
cyrus-imapd? Is this feasible?
Thanks,
Luca
