Re: [Bug-zile] Re: zile-2.4.0alpha1 released [alpha]

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Hi Ulrich,

On 3 Apr 2011, at 04:45, Ulrich Mueller <address@hidden> wrote:

>>>>>> On Sat, 02 Apr 2011, Gary V Vaughan wrote:
> 
>>> From a distro point of view, this will considerably increase Zile's
>>> footprint: A 2.3.23 installation requires 270 kB of disk space on
>>> an amd64 system, whereas for Zile plus Lua it will be about 1.5 MB.
> 
>> Not at all.
> 
> My numbers were not guesses out of the blue, but based on the actual
> size of the installation on a 64 bit Gentoo system.
> dev-lang/lua-5.1.4-r7 [1] alone comes in at 995 kB.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply you had guessed. But I do wonder why
the amd64 Lua runtime is 4 times the size of the core2 64bit runtime
on my machine? Even with headers and man pages, the whole
package weighs less than 400Kb here.

What do you have in there? Surely liblua, /bin/lua, /bin/luac and the
respective man pages is sufficient? Are you building with debug symbols
to fill the additional 700Kb compared to my brew installation? 

>> A distro that wants to really keep everything small would likely
>> find compiling a dedicated static lua with just the functions Zile
>> uses from the supporting libs and with minified lua code embedded
>> therein wouldn't have a great deal of trouble trimming back to under
>> 300k again IMHO.
> 
> Sure, such things can be done. The downside is increased cost for
> maintenance of the lua package, because we would need a special
> stripped down version for our install media.

Yes, it's a trade off between size and effort for sure. However it's not
at all complicated to embed a squishyfied Lua code blob and call luaL_
loadstring on it, plus luaL_loadlibrary for each embedded C code module
before compiling. The extra maintenance would be to look after a
customized lua.c that has #includes for the additional headers
and squishy blob, hardly anything at all... my package has 2 extra
includes, 1 loadlibrary and 1 loadstring - that's just 4 lines of code!
Contact me off list if you'd like more details.

Anyway, I arrived at the 35Kb squished Zile runtime in less than 10 minutes,
which alone makes for a 450Kb usage for Zile plus all dependencies. Feel
free to add the Squishy file I sent you to the Zile ebuild for an easy win on
disk savings.

Cheers,
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan (gary AT gnu DOT org)