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Postings from November 2010
I've been experimenting with what a stripped down perl install might
look like. From the branch commit log:
Add install-stripped target to Makefile.SH
install-stripped will omit man pages, omit pod/* and strip Pod
from all .pm, .pl and .pod files. It results in a significantly
smaller final installation, though obviously without
documentation. It also strips debugging symbols from binaries.
On my system, using './Configure -des -Dusedevel', the install
directory is 61M with 'make install' but only 32M with
'make install-stripped'. When compressed as .tgz files,
the results are 15M and 7.3M respectively.
Note that this does not remove any functionality (except for breaking
"use diagnostics" due to missing pod/perldiag.pod) and yet achieves
significant reduction in size.
The next big size reduction would start impacting functionality,
particularly, removing the $archlib/CORE directory and/or eliminating
four large Encode modules. Beyond that, some additional size
optimization around Unicode tables might squeeze a little bit more.
I'm curious if our Debian/Ubuntu friends have an actual size target in
mind when they are looking to save space on the install media. This
seems like it could be a pretty big win without giving up much at all.
-- David
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