[Python-ideas] size of the installation of Python on mobile devices

[M.-A. Lemburg]

On 30.07.2016 14:18, Xavier de Gaye wrote:
> On 07/30/2016 09:25 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>> For example, as Terry mentioned not all applications need the
>> unicodedata module, and it's *big*, but many applications I can
>> imagine doing myself (spam-checking and other validation of textual
>> data) would include it.
> 
> How *big* exactly ?
> The size of the unicodedata shared library is 843K on archlinux when a
> sourceless distribution saves many tens of Mega bytes and a
> distribution without the test suite saves about 60M.
> 
> IMHO only three options should be implemented, if the Python community
> really thinks seriously about porting Python to mobile devices:
>     * --enable-sourceless-distribution
>     * --disable-test-suite
>     * --disable-distutils-builds
> The last option is to get rid of the config (LIBPL) directory that is
> used to build extension modules, as one cannot expect most mobile
> devices to have a proper build environment anyway.
> 
> The result would be a distribution in the 10M order of magnitude, ten
> times smaller than the current size. Then we can look into
> compression, the impacts of compression on the size of the memory used
> by the python process and the impacts of compression on performance in
> mobile devices.
> 
> The remaining savings (unicodedata, turtledemo, tkinter, unittest,
> ...) should be left to packagers.

IMO, this should all be left to packagers. They will have to
patch the code base anyway to get things working in such
an environment, so there isn't much point in adding some
bits to the configure script which everyone uses, while
leaving out other important parts. This doesn't simplify
the life of packagers much, but does add maintenance
overhead for the core developers (since these new options
would have to be tested as well before release).

BTW: By not having these options in configure, you also
gain a lot more freedom as packager, since you can have
the build behave you would like it to instead of going
through the whole change request discussion process that
updates/changes to these options would entail going
forward.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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