Re: Status update on 1.0

[Timothy Sample <samplet@ngyro.com>]

Hi Ludo,

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Hello Guix!
>
> When we said we’d try to release 1.0 for FOSDEM, we were talking about
> FOSDEM *2019*, which is well over now, so I think we need to get our act
> together and complete the remaining tasks for 1.0.  :-)
>
> Looking at the
> <https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/maintenance.git/tree/doc/1.0.org>
> plus my own memories, here are work items that still need to be
> addressed:
>
> [...]
>
>   • GDM works well for GNOME and WMs that provide a .session file.
>     However it still doesn’t honor ~/.xsession.  We discussed it before
>     and dropped the ball.  Timothy, what’s missing?  I’d really like to
>     make it the default.

Nothing is missing!  As promised [1], in the last patch series I made
GDM run our custom “xinitrc” script instead of the built-in one.  This
happened in commit 41fa9f1815685ede0d3fdc1c561d2a9cf0ffb158.  :)

(I tested this now to be absolutely sure, and it works like a charm.)

>   • GDM’s closure is 1.3 GiB, we should do something about it.

Yes.  We should be working on “guix size gnome-shell”.  It more
accurately reflects the size of GDM, and (I hope you’re sitting down) it
weighs in at 2GiB!

Fortunately, it looks like we could claw back ~400MiB by (somehow)
dropping “hplip-minimal”.  It gets pulled in through the path

    gdm → gnome-settings-daemon → colord → sane-backends →
    hplip-minimal.

We almost certainly don’t need it for GDM.  I guess removing it means
making a version of “colord” without “sane-backends”.  It was introduced
in commit 4c9287432824f396d5c614c3b2287f553cd9fb90.  I’ll look into
this.

GNOME Shell has a handful of silly references like “inkscape” and
“webkitgtk” that are huge and (I assume) unnecessary.

There seems to be a handful of easy wins.  I would be surprised if we
could get the closure of “gnome-shell” below 1GiB, but we will see.
Also, keep in mind that a lot of these bytes will be recycled.  For
instance, GTK+ 3 is ~700MiB, and chances are there will be at least one
GTK+ 3 application besides GDM.


[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2019-02/msg00198.html


-- Tim