Re: Guix size reduction work group

[Julien Lepiller <julien@lepiller.eu>]

Le 4 février 2020 11:22:10 GMT-05:00, zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> a écrit :
>Hi Pierre,
>
>On Tue, 4 Feb 2020 at 16:57, Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz>
>wrote:
>
>> Shall we start a work group to fix the issue?
>
>One of the obvious bottleneck is the documentation. Some packages come
>with a full doc and sometimes with Pandoc and/or TeX stuff. In
>general, it is required but when speaking about more minimalism...
>So, the only way is to examine package by package and to check the
>status of the documentation, IMHO.
>
>
>All the best,
>simon

Another thing to address is the package closure size by pruning some elements from packages' closures. The obvious one is gcc, that appears in some closure because of a file that registers compilation commands for instance. Another situation is when a package requires a part of another package, and another part of that package (unused) requires more stuff.
This happened with mariadb: some software needed mariadb's library, but the mariadb also came with binaries that required more dependencies. Splitting mariadb reduced the closure of qt5 by 200 MB for instance, for a combination of these two reasons, and the fact that binaries in mariadb are really big.