What is a minimally sized library?

Question

Recently I was building libxml2 and I was looking through the options for the configure script. One of the options was this.

--with-minimum          build a minimally sized library (off)

I have never heard of a "minimally sized library" before so I Googled it. To my surprise all I can find with the search "what is a 'minimally sized library'" are lists of configuration options that include exactly this quote, but no explanation as to what it does.

So what is a minimally sized library?

Answer 1

The --with-minimum flag disables all optional features, resulting in the smallest possible binary size. It is basically equivalent to:

--with-c14n=no
--with-catalog=no
--with-debug=no
--with-docbook=no
--with-fexceptions=no
--with-ftp=no 
--with-history=no
--with-html=no
--with-http=no 
--with-iconv=no
--with-iso8859x=no
--with-legacy=no
--with-mem-debug=no
--with-output=no
--with-pattern=no
--with-push=no
--with-python=no
--with-reader=no
--with-readline=no
--with-regexps=no
--with-run-debug=no
--with-sax1=no
--with-schemas=no
--with-schematron=no
--with-threads=no
--with-thread-alloc=no
--with-tree=no
--with-valid=no
--with-writer=no
--with-xinclude=no
--with-xpath=no
--with-xptr=no
--with-zlib=no
--with-modules=no

But it allows to enable any of these features selectively.