Re: Tiny Guix (and containers)

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl> writes:

>   22M     3x53yv4v144c9xp02rs64z7j597kkqax-gcc-5.4.0-lib

According to “du”, this is 32M on my disk.  The “lib” subdir contains
both shared libraries as well as ar archives for static linking;
together they weigh in at 12MB.  We may want to move them to a separate
output.

The package also contains lots of header files:

    6.3M	/gnu/store/3x53yv4v144c9xp02rs64z7j597kkqax-gcc-5.4.0-lib/lib/gcc/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/5.4.0/plugin/include/

Not sure what to do with those without making the use of GCC a hassle.

>   41M     n6nvxlk2j8ysffjh3jphn1k5silnakh6-glibc-2.25

This package still contains a lot of locale data.  The directory
“share/i18n/locales/” takes up 6.7M, and “share/locale” takes up another
4.3M.  All the .a files under “lib” take up 8.7M.

>   34M     nnykzgwfy8mwh2gmxm715sjxykg8qjwn-binutils-2.28

“share/locale” is 9.4M.  This is a cross-cutting concern.  We don’t have
a way to globally filter locales to only requested locales.  Even if we
split them each into a separate output — how would you specify that you
want the “de_DE” locale in each package and not install the rest?

There seems to be some duplication with these directories:

    /gnu/store/nnykzgwfy8mwh2gmxm715sjxykg8qjwn-binutils-2.28/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/bin/
    /gnu/store/nnykzgwfy8mwh2gmxm715sjxykg8qjwn-binutils-2.28/bin/

But the binaries seem to be hardlinked, so they don’t take up extra
space.

> Now it takes forever to set up the image

Have you tried disabling compression?  This could be a lot faster.  I
found that tar with gzip compression is terribly slow to copy things
from the store into a compressed tar archive.  Disabling compression
speeds this up considerably, even though it is still rather slow.

--
Ricardo

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