Size of Cygwin's distribution

Alejandro Lopez-Valencia dradul at yahoo.com
Mon Jun 9 11:20:36 EDT 2003


Well, I am here downloading the 2.2.3 distribution that Jason Tishler
so gracefully makes available to us Cygwin users. (Good work!)

Yet, I do have a little complain: size. Why is so big? There is a lot
of unnecessary bloat caused by including byte-compiled files, both
optimized and unoptimized. It is incredibly simple to have Cygwin's
post-install script to generate all the byte-compiled files at
installation file using python, compileall.py and a small shell
script. Not everyone uses broadband!

Python 2.2.2-7 distribution is 5.204.820 bytes in my disk, using bzip2
compression. If I delete the byte-compiled files, the size reduces to
3.324.165 bytes! Python 2.3 will be *much* bigger and any size saving
is a blessing for us modem users.

Cheers

Alejo





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