Ethereal-dev: RE: [Ethereal-dev] Reduction of size of ethereal binaries in officialbuild for W

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From: "Graham Bloice" <graham.bloice@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 12:20:26 -0000
> Hello all,
>
> building ethereal without debugging information reduces the size of the
> binaries by 40% !
>
> In this case, the installers' size is reduced to 8.6 MB when lzma
> compression is used and both GTK1 and GTK2 version of Ethereal
> are included.
>
> I would build the official release without those debugging information.
> Somebody who wants to use the debuggin information has to download the
> source and build ethereal locally anyway.
>
> To build without debugging information you have to remove /Zi flag in
> LOCAL_CFLAGS and /DEBUG flag in LOCAL_LDFLAGS in config.nmake .
>

After performing some build tests I've concluded that the /Zi flag doesn't
affect, in any significant way, the final executable size whereas as the
linker flag does (by nearly 50%).

I would suggest that we leave the compiler flag to produce pdb files, and
remove the debug flag from the linker.

The pdb files can be used with the release build and either a Dr Watson
crash dump (providing it's not one of the "broken" versions of Dr Watson
{NT4 SP5 & 6 or W2K SP2}) or a user dump and the WinDbg debugger to
determine what went wrong.

Regards,

Graham Bloice