[BusyBox] Changing the way help is displayed...

Tom Cameron TCameron at stmarysbank.com
Fri Apr 13 17:52:52 UTC 2001


Hello all,
	I have a wacky topic for discussion.  Would it be more size
efficient if the help text wasn't stored in the BB binary _at_all_?  By
this I mean, don't have any short or long help compiled into the binary
file.  Instead, dynamically read the help text from a file.  What do
people think?  Obviously the file would have to be "tagged" in some way
so that not ALL of the help topics are displayed...but only the one for
the applet being executed.  Any thoughts?  If you think of the number of
bytes used by the help text for each and every applet in the BB binary,
I think having one re-used function would be smaller...but again, I have
no real factual numbers...as I wouldn't really know where to begin.
	Doing something like this would also allow the developer to
chose short or long help messages...and upon compiling BB, the help file
would be created accordingly.  Additionally, this would allow for a
"help-less" system, as the developer could simply delete the file.  Just
a thought.  Let me know what you all think...it may be worth looking
into.

--
Thomas Cameron
Network Technician / Operations Specialist
St. Mary's Bank





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