On Wed Jun 03 06:18 PM, A. Wilcox wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I've been looking at the dependencies of our base system packages, and
> also the size of the live images. I'm not very happy with what I've seen.
>
> The 64-bit PowerPC live target image is 364 MiB uncompressed. I feel
> like this is significantly larger than it needs to be.
>
> The single largest package, at 51.2 MB, is Perl. The only package
> pulling Perl into the base system is console-setup. Max (sroracle_at_) has
> mentioned investigating a replacement for console-setup, so I will defer
> to that work. That would be a great and simple win by itself.
As discussed on IRC, I have implemented this according to the following:
1. kbd-openrc now provides the "consolefont" service (openrc used to
provide this) and also the "keymaps" service (also shipped with
openrc, but it was dropped when we first added console-setup in
2018).
2. console-setup has been pared down to just the ckbcomp utility and
moved to user/.
3. adelie-base depends on kbd now instead of console-setup.
If you formerly used console-setup in order to change the keyboard
layout for the Linux console, please give the merge request with the
changes outlined above a try:
https://code.foxkit.us/adelie/packages/-/merge_requests/457
> Another large set of packages is our viewer for manual pages. Right
> now, documentation viewing is done via man-db. The man-db package is
> 1.2 MB, but it requires the GNU groff typesetting system which is 17 MB
> and the Berkeley database library which is an additional 2.1 MB. Added
> up, this is over 20 MB.
>
> The BSD operating systems, Gentoo, Void, and Alpine are using the mandoc
> package, which came from the OpenBSD and NetBSD communities. This
> package appears to be less than 1 MB installed, and would allow us to
> not only significantly reduce the size of all base images, but would
> also allow us to remove another GNU package from base. I think we
> should seriously investigate this option.
If no one else is interested in trying this out I can take it up. I
think it has a lower priority than the console-setup or GRUB issues, but
it would be nice to do if only that we could close BTS#230 [1] (which I
haven't been able to reproduce, but still).
> The live images also include hwids, allowing you to determine the names
> of PCI cards, graphics adaptors, network adaptors, etc. from the live
> environment. This is very useful, but the databases use almost 30 MB.
> Can we investigate if there is any way to compress them? I understand
> that squashfs already uses gzip on the entire image, but I am also
> thinking about size used on installed systems.
Is it installed in the default configuration, or just on the live CD?
> Finally, the GRUB base package uses 17 MB for the various tools. I do
> not think all of those tools are needed in the base GRUB package - do
> all systems really need `grub-sparc64-setup` or `grub-syslinux2cfg`? I
> feel this should be something else we investigate.
I can look at this but I doubt a few tools are causing the size to
balloon - it's probably all of the modules we ship, and I don't know
that we can drop any of them.
Max
[1]
https://bts.adelielinux.org/show_bug.cgi?id=230
Received on Fri Jun 05 2020 - 00:09:41 UTC