vogt.adam:

* On Monday, April 05 2010, Don Stewart wrote:

...

Hey all,

There are some grumblings about the "650M install" size for ghc 6.12 Arch package. A lot of this can't be helped, and disk is cheap, but it might be worth a check to see how we're packaging GHC.

On Fedora, for example, they ship the prof libs in a separate package, so their install size is 270M (around half).

Maybe we should do that?

As a comparison, the compressed package sizes on various distros:

GHC package on Arch: 109M Mac installer: 138M Windows installer: 55M

Where did you get this size from?

Oh, du -hs on the pkg file. Interesting that it is only 55M !!

Here I have:

$ pacman -Si ghc

Repository : extra Name : ghc Version : 6.12.1-4 ... Download Size : 55512.89 K Installed Size : 681026.00 K Packager : Ionut Biru Architecture : x86_64

And that seems to include profiling libraries.

My concern for splitting out the profiling libraries is that it will increase the total download size for people who need to profile.

So my theory is the majority of users don't want to profile, they want to run darcs or xmonad ...

Perhaps it might be easier to put a script on the arch wiki for deleting profiling libs (and updaing ghc's registry) after the package has been installed?

Maybe, and maybe this isn't really a valid concern anymore, but more a cultural thing in Arch. -- Don

xyne:

...

Maybe, and maybe this isn't really a valid concern anymore, but more a cultural thing in Arch.

-- Don

How much would the difference in size be if you removed the profiling libraries?

It would be about 280M (going by Fedora, which moves .prof's into a separate bundle). On Debian, there is a separate .prof and separate .doc bundle as well.

If it is significant then I think it would be more in line with the Arch way to move them to an optional dependency. Even if disk is cheap, it goes against the minimalist ethos of the distro to bundle everything and I'm sure that many users are put off by the size of the ghc package.

Of course, the other part of the Arch way is to stay as far upstream as possible so if the profiling libs are intended to be a part of the package there then there is a strong argument to leave them in, but I think the strength of that argument depends directly on the size difference and how many users actually use those libs.

Providing something smaller might also encourage more casual use of ghc and haskell and thus help to promote the language.

-- Don