Re: Tiny Guix (and containers)

[Pjotr Prins]

Hi Ricardo,

Thanks for responding. I think this discussion belongs here.

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 09:02:56AM +0200, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> 
> Pjotr Prins <address@hidden> 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.

Yes, I think that is what we should head for eventually. I vaguely
remember a discussion about this on this ML and people were against
separate outputs for doc, include, static-lib etc.  What are you all
thinking now? Does it make sense to have the base package as small as
possible and split out the rest?

I know it is extra work.

> 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.

Yes, that goes with gcc. No point keeping those separate.

> >   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?

Yes, it is a specific target discussion. Same goes for compilation
without debug information and optimizing for size. Tiny = tiny.

Ludo wrote at some point that target optimizations are on the roadmap.
It would be rather good to have. Maybe in the form of channels.

> 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.

That will help :). But I was talking about Docker images. Making them
small would be helpful for a lot of people out there. It takes forever
to download and run Docker tests, for example, I hear people complain.

Pj.