Re: [Libevent-users] To upgrade or not to upgrade - that is the question

[Nick Mathewson <nickm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 3:16 PM, Thor Lancelot Simon <tls@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 04:27:47PM -0700, Gilad Benjamini wrote:
>>
>> What are the major benefits of 2.0 ?
>
> From my point of view, a lot of convenience code was added which many
> large programs already written to the libevent 1.4 APIs would already
> have, some APIs were cleaned up, and the library was bloated almost
> beyond all recognition.

Sorry to hear it; I've heard this offline from a couple of other
people too.  The APIs do not seem bloaty to me, but I suppose that any
API that your projct doesn't need is necessarily bloat to you.

As it stands, there's nothing stopping you from just linking with the
libevent_core library, and omitting most of the stuff you don't like.
The protocol stuff is all in libevent_extra, and the ssl support is in
libevent_openssl.  Those parts you can just not use if you don't want
or need them.

The bufferevent code stays in libevent_core (since it was there in
1.4.x) but nothing inherently stops libevent_core from splitting in
some future release, maybe into a libevent_base and a
libevent_buffered or something.  If you're building for a
very-low-memory embedded environment, you can also chop out some more
code with --disable-thread-support and --disable-malloc-replacement
and --disable-debug-mode.

I'm amenable to making the libraries even more fine-grained in 2.1 or
later if somebody else wants to do the refactoring work on that, or
adding configure flags to disable API components (e.g.,
--disable-bufferevents, --disable-listener) if people would find that
useful.  The splitting could be a bit tricky, though, since old code
that linked with -levent or -levent_core would need to keep working.

I'm afraid I don't see the point of splitting the source distribution,
though.  What would be gained by that, other than having less source
to download?

-- 
Nick
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