----- On Feb 2, 2018, at 1:03 AM, Mike Miller mtmil...@debian.org wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 01, 2018 at 12:13:40 -0800, Mike Miller wrote: >> If this bug is still of interest, I think a useful first step would be >> for someone to adapt the octave source package and add the appropriate >> --without-X options. Once there are proof of concept binary packages >> built without any graphical dependencies, then a useful disk usage >> comparison can be done. > > Here is an example of what I suggest interested parties can do quite > easily. Modify the source package as in the attached example patch. This > is not an example of a full solution, just a quick and dirty hack to > build octave with no graphical dependencies. Note that this will also be > a slightly crippled octave without any imread or imwrite capability. > > With the resulting packages, I can compare the storage requirements in a > clean minbase installation: > > # apt install --no-install-recommends octave > … > 0 upgraded, 181 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. > Need to get 88.3 MB of archives. > After this operation, 450 MB of additional disk space will be used. > > versus > > # apt install --no-install-recommends ./octave_4.2.1-6_amd64.deb \ > ./liboctave4_4.2.1-6_amd64.deb \ > ./octave-common_4.2.1-6_all.deb > … > 0 upgraded, 69 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. > Need to get 29.9 MB/38.9 MB of archives. > After this operation, 167 MB of additional disk space will be used. > > So I have saved about 280 MB in storage by dropping all graphical > dependencies. That's about 5 MB in the octave binaries themselves and > the rest in the dropped dependencies. Octave will not have a GUI, will > not be able to plot anything, and will not be able to read or write > image file formats. > > Is 0.25-0.3 GB on the order of the savings you are looking for? Is it > worth not being able to work with image files or plot anything, even > headless plotting? > > -- > mike This is a relevant saving for tiny mass storage such as SD cards of 1-4GB. For compute servers, it is worth, for just the reason that a server spin of a distribution is not becoming a desktop variant by adding the X and Qt stacks. Thanks for your test Christian Himpe -- Christian Himpe Computational Methods in Systems and Control Theory Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems Sandtorstr. 1 D-39106 Magdeburg Germany
