Re: [gentoo-catalyst] [PATCH v2] stage1-controller.sh: Remove some old poor cleaning code

["Anthony G. Basile" <basile@opensource.dyc.edu>]

On 09/10/14 13:16, Rick "Zero_Chaos" Farina wrote:
> On 09/09/2014 02:38 PM, Brian Dolbec wrote:
>> On Mon,  1 Sep 2014 22:05:45 -0700
>> Brian Dolbec <dolsen@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>
>>> This code had portage bin path hard coded.  That path needed to be
>>> changed for a new portage ebuild and install system.
>>> After testing the origianl code and comparing it with some updated
>>> code supplied by Douglas Freed.  It turned out both code chunks
>>> resulted in nothing being cleaned.
>>>
>>> Tested and confirmed by zero_chaos.
>>
>> I have gone over things more and tested the new find command. It does
>> work on my host system.  However, the question remains... DOES this
>> particular cleaning operation NEED to be performed?
>>
>> With current the tree snapshot for my testing 20140829.  It does not
>> find anything to clean.  BUT, will that remain the same in the future
>> as pkgs are bumped?
>>
>> For safety, I'd be inclined to keep the find command (v1 of the
>> patch) and clean any it does find just in case.
>>
>
> If we truly need to remove these files, I don't think catalyst was ever
> the place to do this.  We have USE=static and USE=static-libs for a
> reason.  Randomly removing files from the filesystem was a hack then,
> and if we are cleaning this up let's just remove it.  If I want to build
> things with USE=static or USE=static-libs then catalyst shouldn't be
> pointlessly crippling my builds.
>
> v2 means one less horrible hack in catalyst, and one at a time is the
> only way will remove all the horror.
>
> -Zero
>

I just did some testing here.  You have to be very careful not to remove 
the wrong .a's else you break the toolchain.  So I agree, remove the 
.a's in the ebuilds switched on USE=statlic-libs, and not in catalyst. 
The biggest .a's in stage1 are libpythonXX.a which are 3 to 4 MB, but 
the others are like a few hundred K's at most.  The gain is a smaller 
stage, but the downside is headaches making sure we don't break something.

So, to slim down stage1, see if you can get USE=static-libs in python's 
ebuilds and build USE=-static-libs.  That itself will reduce that stage 
by about 8 MBs which is more than all the "expendable" .a's put together.

-- 
Anthony G. Basile, Ph. D.
Chair of Information Technology
D'Youville College
Buffalo, NY 14201
(716) 829-8197