Re: sliming down package size on Maemo

On Tue, 8 Nov 2005, Tomas Frydrych wrote:

> Date: Tue, 08 Nov 2005 07:30:31 +0000
> From: Tomas Frydrych <tomasfrydrych@yahoo.co.uk>
> To: abidevlist <abiword-dev@abisource.com>
> Subject: Re: sliming down package size on Maemo
>
>
> Hi Hub,
>
> Hubert Figuiere wrote:
> > I would like to suggest a few things about sliming down the package for
> > abiword on Maemo.
> >
> > 13MB is huge for the device.
>
> Agreed.

There are other distributions (like Puppy Linux for example) which are
interested in having as small as possible a version of Abiword and smaller
version of abiword might help make it generally easier to push for the
inclusion of abiword in a distribution (we might get our foot in the door
as a viewer/plugin for Evolution for example).

Presumably these changes could be done as compile options but ones which
would be used by default for platforms like Maemo.

> > -remove all the /usr/share/doc found in the package... *sigh*

> Yes, I am for. (The docs are available at www.abisource.com, and after
> all this is an internet tablet.) Is it possible to have the context help
> to point to abisource.com rather than localy? This would seem ideal.

I have a strange feeling about this. The time it takes to fire up a
browser and navigate to a page could be considerable. It might be safer
and less brittle if we were to provide a single local page of
documentation containing a link to the online documentation and the
abisource website. Presumably there is already a page in the
documentation which could says something like "the latest version of the
documentation is available online at ..."

> > -remove spell checking as we don't ship any dictionnary
> Not sure about this, as I would like to be able download and install
> dictionaries eventually. I am also not convinced that this would reduce
> the size of the binary much. I know there is no enchant (yet); it might
> be worth checking if the system provides ispell; it if does, we could do
> what we do on windows.
>
> > -remove printing support as currently there is not infrastructure in the
> > OS and it has been disabled in the menu.

> Not entirely sure about this. I cannot see myself wanting to print from
> the device very often, but not having the option at all is quite
> different.

Presumably this would only be removed temporarily until it was available
from the OS and I cannot imagine it would offer huge savings (isn't it
mostly glue code connecting up to gnome-print?). At the risk of sounding
foolish is there any way this could be done which would allow all users
who dont have printing setup to save benefit. Is printing support
something which could be made entirely seperable like some odd kind of
plugin?

- Alan
Received on Tue Nov 8 16:23:19 2005