Re: Status update on 1.0

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

Timothy Sample <address@hidden> skribis:

> This didn’t work as well as I had hoped.  I was able to make a “lib”
> output for “colord”, which gets rid of “hplip-minimal” and, in turn,
> “gcc”.  However, it was supposed to also remove “llvm” and address@hidden,
> but those are still in the closure because of other packages.  It looks
> like breaking apart “mesa” (as Debian and Nix do) could cut out “llvm”
> and maybe address@hidden  The reason address@hidden is there is because of
> “glib:bin”.  The “gnome-session” package brings it in so that it can
> call “gsettings”.  Debian splits the GLib executables into “bin” and
> “dev-bin”, and only the latter needs Python 3.  This is tricky because
> “mesa” and “glib” have thousands of dependants, so changing them could
> cause a lot of problems.  Splitting GLib is not so bad, but Mesa looks
> to be quite complicated.

Yeah, splitting MESA and GLib are longer-term project I guess, but it’s
good that you’ve already analyzed the situation so we know what to do
next.

> Another area that could be improved is NetworkManager.  GDM only needs
> the “libnm” part, but it ends up bringing in everything.  NetworkManager
> doesn’t have many dependants, so this could be done pretty quickly
> (provided that splitting it is easy enough).

Indeed.

> I managed to remove “webgitgtk” from the closure of “gnome-shell”.

Neat!  Do you have that patch around?  :-)

> All told, GDM is down to 1.2GiB, and GNOME Shell is 1.64GiB.  That’s
> better, but not great.  Plenty of GNOME software comes in big bundles
> where you get a daemon, a low-level D-Bus library, a high-level library,
> a GUI, and some utilities.  Being able to break these up would improve
> the situation quite a bit, but it will be a lot of work.  I don’t know
> how much of this we can solve before 1.0.  It all depends on how much of
> a hurry we’re in.  :)

That will be post-1.0, let’s focus on the low-hanging fruits for now.
:-)

> Right now, I have a bit testing to do with my current patches, and then
> maybe I could break up NetworkManager and fix the dependency cycle with
> GDM and GNOME Shell.  If it can go through a core-updates cycle, I could
> split up GLib.  I don’t think I can split up Mesa, though.  I am not
> very familiar with it.
>
> I will be tied up for about a week, so I won’t be able to do any of it
> before next weekend (Mar. 29).

OK, thank you for your work!

Ludo’.