[Libreoffice] RC1 / size redux ...

[Michael Meeks]

Hi there,

	So - as we all know, RC1 is too large; and there are a complicated set
of reasons why that is so, which includes some tradeoff between install
time disk space, download size[1], fairness between languages, mirror
capacity, build and up-load times, and so on and so on.

	Anyhow - the good news is, that - having analyzed our .cab file by
expanding it, re-compressing each file individually (with zip), and then
analysing the results - it seems there are some fairly obvious size wins
that are possible. I've uploaded a (2Mb) spreadsheet here:

	http://users.freedesktop.org/~michael/sizes.ods

	40% of our size is endless duplicates of impress templates (one per
language) - ~none of which have any significant translated content in
them; we should simply ship one copy of each template instead. I believe
some packagers do this on Linux already.

	Similarly, ~20% of the remaining size is (once again multiply
duplicated) .ott files for the Wizards - which should be substantially
identical - with a very little translation sprinkled on top. However -
these will require coding fixes (or plain removal for 3.4 if the size is
too significant). Then another ~20% of the remaining size is license
files in English duplicated again and again per language.

	Similarly, if we cut our themes down to just two, we can save around 14
Mb on the compressed image, and so on and so on.

	Of course - this requires real work; it is not just a matter of wishing
for it :-) but it it is (I hope) all quite do-able.

	We should be able to get some of these improvements into 3.4, and more
into 3.5.

	Ergo - I am still very optimistic that we can ship a windows
installer / exe that is closer to 200Mb than 300 - without unreasonable
effort.

	Anyhow - at least for RC1 - we have (if it can be download) the code
that everyone will be running - and which is the thing that needs
testing - major regressions / crasher bugs appreciated :-)

	HTH,

		Michael.

[1] - the bigger the uncompressed .cab, the better NSIS' lzma
compression can remove duplication eg.
-- 
 michael.meeks at novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot