Slimming down a tclkit
Y.T.
download the recent tclkit (these days from code.google.com) and fire
it up and have pretty much everything I need right at hand. When I'm
finished writing/debugging something and it runs fine from within
tclkit, I use sdx to wrap it up into a standalone distributable and
leave it at that.
For the "wrapping up" part (I use a little self-written app, in TCL,
that keeps track of the resources that have to be added to the vfs/lib
before wrapping) there's invariably a step that looks kinda like this:
sdx::sdx wrap $appname.exe -runtime $tclkitcopy
where $tclkitcopy is a copy of my tclkit (since I cannot use the one
I'm currently sitting in).
Now while I find tclkit perfectly adequate in performance/capabilities
for my dev work, once I commit to wrapping a runtime it tends to be
way too large. There's hundreds kB of stuff in there that I do not
ever (will not ever) need in my distributables. I understand *just
enough* of the internals of metakit to know that I can do something
like
sdx::sdx lsk ./tclkit-8.5.8-win32.upx.exe
to get a listing of all the "batteries included" in the kit. 100kB
just for tcltest, which will never be used in my distributables.
Another 100k for various i18n concepts, like the Ukraine-encoding for
the Mac or the polish message catalog. I write little gui apps that
are being used internally in a non-civilian US aerospace outfit to
control equipment; I definitely will never need any of these.
I also definitely don't want anything in there that can make (or even
accept, shudder) network connections, I definitely don't need the aqua
theme (or any "theme", for that matter), I don't rely on obsolete
functions that are included "for compatibility" (optparse etc), and
for my general use I could even do away with fairly-standard-TCL-bits
that I simply never use (tearoff or mkpsenc or such. Even console, I
suppose).
So what I'm trying to figure out (and have been rather unsuccessful
at) is how to use all these fabulous vfs tools at my disposal to open
a (copy of) a tclkit and *remove* various parts from it; leaving the
STAR alone (which isn't listed by 'sdx lsk', apparently because the
metakit content is merely appended to the binary itself).
This strikes me as such a useful thing to do, that I'm sure this must
have been asked before - however I'm having the hardest time finding
any adequate documentation. Dozens of webpages telling me how to "make
my first starkit (or even starpack)" and very little about the
mechanics behind the scenes and how to customize things and such.
Any help would be appreciated ...
cordially
Y.T.
--
Remove yourclothes to email me.
Thomas Braun
[Slimming the tclkit runtime]
> Any help would be appreciated ...
>
Have a look at...
...and read, how to build your own slim tclkit runtime executable.
Cheers...
Pat Thoyts
[snip]
First bear in mind that the sizes you see reported for the kit
contents are not the true size in the db. Everything is compressed in
the vfs and text files compress very nicely. So you may not achieve
much saving except for eliminating some of the i18n catalogs.
You can of course build your own tclkit - but its probably simplest
here to split off the vfs, mount it in a tcl interpreter and remove
the stuff you think you can loose.
sdx mksplit mytclkit.exe ;# splits off mytclkit.head and .tail
tclkitsh
% vfs::mk4::Mount mytclkit.tail vfs
% cd vfs
% foreach file {lib/tcl8.6/encoding/cp869 lib/tcl8.6/....} {
file delete $file
}
Once you deleted and modified everything you just concatenate the exe
and database parts.
[windows] copy /b mytclkit.head + mytclkit.tail mytclkit.exe
[unix] cat mytclkit.head mytclkit.tail > mytclkit
On windows with the metakit sources there is a program called
kviewer.exe which shows the metakit database structure and the
compressed size and uncompressed size - that might help you to target
the right things.
Also - you can upx compress more aggressively. The windows tclkits are
usually compressed already using upx --best but you can do more if you
are patient. Split the binary as above (rename the head to head.exe)
and do:
upx -q --ultra-brute --compress-resources=0 mytclkit.head.exe
then join the parts together again.
Finally - tclkit-gui is smaller that tclkit. It can also be
code-signed if you need that.
--
Pat Thoyts http://www.patthoyts.tk/
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Larry W. Virden
wrote:
>
> Once you deleted and modified everything you just concatenate the exe
> and database parts.
After doing that, then carefully test the resulting program (which
should no longer be called tclkit, so that you and others don't
confuse the skinny kit with the real thing).
There might be dependencies of which you are not aware on the pieces
you are removing because you don't explicitly use them.
Y.T.
Thanks -- that was exactly the kind of pointer I was looking for.
Now the usual question: where should I have looked this up? Which
documentation did I fail to read?
And for future googlers looking for the same info, here's a few more
remarks:
> sdx mksplit mytclkit.exe ;# splits off mytclkit.head and .tail
> tclkitsh
> % vfs::mk4::Mount mytclkit.tail vfs
> % cd vfs
> % foreach file {lib/tcl8.6/encoding/cp869 lib/tcl8.6/....} {
> file delete $file
>
> }
At this point one should probably do an Unmount and up to this point,
the result is not actually any smaller until the db is (re)packed.
I.e. something like
set db [vfs::mk4::Mount tclkitcopy.tail vfs]
file delete vfs/lib/tcl8/8.5/tcltest-2.3.2.tm
vfs::mk4::Unmount $db vfs
file rename tclkitcopy.tail tclkitcopy.oldtail
sdx::sdx mkpack tclkitcopy.oldtail tclkitcopy.tail
> Also - you can upx compress more aggressively. The windows tclkits are
> usually compressed already using upx --best but you can do more if you
> are patient. Split the binary as above (rename the head to head.exe)
> and do:
> upx -q --ultra-brute --compress-resources=0 mytclkit.head.exe
> then join the parts together again.
I tried that - -d'ed the head, then recompressed it with the above cmd
line and got the exact same length.
cordially
Y.T.
--
Remove YourClothes to email me.