Re: Guix size reduction work group

[Julien Lepiller]

Le 4 février 2020 11:22:10 GMT-05:00, zimoun <address@hidden> a écrit :
>Hi Pierre,
>
>On Tue, 4 Feb 2020 at 16:57, Pierre Neidhardt <address@hidden>
>wrote:
>
>> Shall we start a work group to fix the issue?
>
>One of the obvious bottleneck is the documentation. Some packages come
>with a full doc and sometimes with Pandoc and/or TeX stuff. In
>general, it is required but when speaking about more minimalism...
>So, the only way is to examine package by package and to check the
>status of the documentation, IMHO.
>
>
>All the best,
>simon

Another thing to address is the package closure size by pruning some elements 
from packages' closures. The obvious one is gcc, that appears in some closure 
because of a file that registers compilation commands for instance. Another 
situation is when a package requires a part of another package, and another 
part of that package (unused) requires more stuff.
This happened with mariadb: some software needed mariadb's library, but the 
mariadb also came with binaries that required more dependencies. Splitting 
mariadb reduced the closure of qt5 by 200 MB for instance, for a combination of 
these two reasons, and the fact that binaries in mariadb are really big.