[LEDE-DEV] Call defines for minifying scripting languages

[Karl Palsson]

Jan-Tarek Butt <tarek at ring0.de> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> My Idea ist to create calldefs to minify all scriptes there are
> interpreted by run time.
> 
> As example see the mail "[PATCH] LuaSrcDiet call define for lua
> code Minifying".
> 
> I plan to write also calldefs for shellscripts, python and
> perl.
> 
> They brings vareous of features.
> 
> 1. Reducing memory size on firmware images.

But will it? They're in the squashfs image, it's already been
demonstrated before that compressing things before can actually
have negative impacts.

> 2. Strip out all comments (which makes us able to do better
> code commenting) 3. and so on.
> 
> One negative point will be there:
> 
> the minified code an not realy human readable but if some one
> want to read this script or work on it on routers, they can
> easily copy the unminified script via scp.

This is a _massive_ downside IMO, and absolutely not something
that should be enabled by default. There's already far too much
undocumented/underdocumented internal behaviours of scripts and
processes in LEDE/OpenWrt, and minifying scripts and stripping
comments actively works to preserve that situation.

Sincerely,
Karl Palsson
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