Re: Packages grow, no longer fit on a 💾

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

"pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <pelzflorian@pelzflorian.de> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:
>> Over the course of a few years, the size of our packages has apparently
>> kept growing.
>
> Disregarding dependencies, most store items got slightly bigger.  This
> is what I wrote at bug#58760 “Guix System iso too big for cdrom again”
> <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/58760>:
>
>> it was possible to burn the Guix System install image to a 700MB CD.
>> But it fits no more. I compared using the du tool (comparison between
>> good old Guix version e427593 and bad new Guix version 3734857f […]).
>> The result is that most packages got slightly bigger and this broke
>> the camel’s back.

There are slight increases of each and every package, and there are also
new big dependencies being pulled in for what, from a distance, doesn’t
really add functionality.

Examples include libgccjit in Emacs and mozjs in polkit.

In a way, that’s the “unavoidable” (?) evolution of software, and the
problem extends largely beyond Guix.

Still, even compared to contemporary distros, we’re doing pretty bad.
Debian most likely does better, and people often cite Alpine as the
distro providing the smallest packages.  Do we have figures?  What can
we learn from them?  What tradeoffs to they make?

I think package size is something we should work on.  I don’t feel good
knowing that ‘bare-bones.tmpl’ yields an OS that’s “equivalent” to
Debian from 20 years ago, yet consumes close to 1 GiB.

Thanks,
Ludo’.