Unnecessary Files?

[Anthony Buck]

Hi again,

Harking back to my prior issues I have built a bowline application
(minimal) just to see what the sizing is like. I can, as of yet, only
vouch for my experience on OSX. From what I can gather ruby is indeed
packaged (personally think this is a good idea) though oddly it would
appear that both i386-darwin & i686-linux libraries are packaged into
the OSX app which seems a touch wasteful! Additionally gems also
appear to be bundled into the app however again there appears to be
both the fully expanded versions and the cached (compressed) versions.
The sizes are as follows:

42M Test.app
26M Test_Less.app (After the surplus libraries and gems are removed)

At the moment I am playing with a tiny little implementation of 7z
decoding which just so happens to be pretty fantastic at compressing
binary data and the likes so here is how big the distributable would
be if it was compressed with 7z which would obviously be decompressed
automatically prior to first program execution.

4.8M Test_Compress.app (Contents compressed)
4.5M Test_Strip_Compress.app (Executables stripped then contents compressed)

This is significantly more reasonable for a little distributed application!

So, back to more questions:

- Although there is no doubting that some of the included gems may
well be needed for bowline to operate is the current bowline-gen app
the "minimal" configuration? If not what is the minimal configuration?
- The major weight in the application is the main executable file
(9.7M in my case) is there any way that this can be significantly
reduced?
- Is there a way to cut down the size of the distributed ruby implementation?

Roja

[Alex MacCaw]

On Jun 11, 10:51 am, Anthony Buck <r...@arbia.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi again,
>
>     Harking back to my prior issues I have built a bowline application
> (minimal) just to see what the sizing is like. I can, as of yet, only
> vouch for my experience on OSX. From what I can gather ruby is indeed
> packaged (personally think this is a good idea) though oddly it would
> appear that both i386-darwin & i686-linux libraries are packaged into
> the OSX app which seems a touch wasteful!

Yes, the i686-linux shouldn't be in the osx distribution - that's a
bug.

Additionally gems also
> appear to be bundled into the app however again there appears to be
> both the fully expanded versions and the cached (compressed) versions.

Again, I didn't realize that was the case, I'll fix that.

> The sizes are as follows:
>
> 42M     Test.app
> 26M     Test_Less.app (After the surplus libraries and gems are removed)

I guess I was a bit off with my 10mb :)

That's a significant reduction - thanks!
There are other ruby libs that could be removed too - such as TK.

>
> At the moment I am playing with a tiny little implementation of 7z
> decoding which just so happens to be pretty fantastic at compressing
> binary data and the likes so here is how big the distributable would
> be if it was compressed with 7z which would obviously be decompressed
> automatically prior to first program execution.
>
> 4.8M Test_Compress.app (Contents compressed)
> 4.5M Test_Strip_Compress.app (Executables stripped then contents compressed)

That's pretty good! How does that compare to a compressed dmg?

>
> This is significantly more reasonable for a little distributed application!
>
> So, back to more questions:
>
> - Although there is no doubting that some of the included gems may
> well be needed for bowline to operate is the current bowline-gen app
> the "minimal" configuration? If not what is the minimal configuration?

Yes, it's the minimum.

> - The major weight in the application is the main executable file
> (9.7M in my case) is there any way that this can be significantly
> reduced?

Yes, stripping the symbols reduces it by quite a bit.

> - Is there a way to cut down the size of the distributed ruby implementation?

Not really.

>
> Roja

Hope that was useful!

[Roja]

Much appreciate all the answers!

I have been looking at doing something very similar to bowline for a
while and had begun to develop something very similar but using Qt as
the basis instead of wx as it comes with a fully tied in
implementation of webkit the only problem being the same bloating
problem. It's difficult to expect users to download a 45meg app that
has a simple purpose. I will continue on my search for a more compact
solution :)

Compressed DMG is bzip2 at best which is demonstrably less efficient
and is only a solution for OSX systems. Beauty with the 7z solution is
that it can be packaged with all distributions as the decompressor is
open, ansi c and compiled weighs in at about 6k...

I also have some work done on providing delta updates again compressed
using z7 which allow for end user applications to be updated really
easily and at a minimal intra-version cost.

Roja