Re: Why is the installer file so big?

[Quentin Spencer]

Matthias Kilian wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 08:26:06PM +0000, Davide Castellone wrote:
>  
>
> > Why doesn't the Lilypond installer seem to be compressed? With
> > my very slow 56k Internet connection I find the source-tarball
> > (about 2.5 MB) more easy to download than the installer for
> > GNU/Linux (>11 MB), but the sources must be compiled (all troubles
> > included...). Isn't it possible to download a compressed installer?
> >    
>
> It *is* compressed. The actual lilypond executable on OpenBSD[1]
> has a size of 34 MB (compressed: 13MB), and the (compressed) binary
> package has a size of about 17 MB.
>
> Ciao,
>         Kili
>
> [1] Not yet officially ported, but it's beeing worked on.
>  

There is one other reason for the size of the installer: it includes 
more than just Lilypond. Because Lilypond depends on recent versions of 
ghostscript, as well as other libraries that are not necessarily 
installed on some Linux systems, the installer includes all of the 
dependencies so that it will be self-contained and always guaranteed to 
work properly. If you want to save bandwidth by installing only those 
dependencies you don't have installed already, some Linux distributions 
have automated ways of doing this, such as apt-get on Debian and its 
derivatives and yum on Fedora.

Quentin