Re: [gentoo-dev] Things one could be upset about

[Patrick Lauer]

On Saturday 17 January 2015 14:00:34 William Hubbs wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 01:44:21PM +0100, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
> > On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 12:35 PM, Patrick Lauer <patrick@g.o>
wrote:
> > > * Stage3 archives are too fat
> > >
> > >     See https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=531632
> > >     We're now shipping three python versions and glib for extra fun!
> > >     Fix: Motivate releng to stop being silly
> >
> > Why the heck do we ship both 3.3 and 3.4? I forget the exact situation
> > with 2.x and 3.x, but I don't think setting PYTHON_TARGETS to 2.7-only
> > is a great option if that remains the default after installation
> > (although it would be fine for just the initial stages).
>
> I'm going to be very blunt. I am sick of the finger being pointed
> only at releng for this.
>
> The issue is package dependencies.
>
> If even one package in the tree has a dumb dependency on python, e.g.
> dev-lang/python, it will pull in all stable versionf of python.

Only if you absolutely insist that releng can never deviate from tree.

Which is a silly idea, see bindist useflag, which is locally enabled for stage 
building and then removed. Oh wait, it's not removed because we can't deviate 
while deviating. So users regularly find ssl 'broken' ...

It took me about 2h of fiddling around to find a few spots where stage3 has 
useless bloat:
- pkgconfig pulling in 30MB of glib
- python installing tests (that's 3x 25MB now ...)
- having more than one python installed (which is not really absolutely 
necessary, and could easily be reduced to one)

Out of 700MB on-disk I could prune about 150MB - about 20%, without affecting 
functionality

It's not about pointing a finger, it's about fixing issues when they are easy to 
fix and not hiding behind a fake complexity argument.
(I would fix things, if I had access and/or certainty that patches provided 
would be integrated ...)

Have fun,

Patrick