Re: How many bytes do we add (closure of guix) when adding one new package?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

Thanks for the detailed analysis!

Simon Tournier <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> skribis:

> Conclusions:
>
>  1. the addition of one package leads to an increase of ~ 12 KiB
>
>  2. the core of Guix is about ~ 62 MiB
>
>  3. doubling the number of packages is doubling the size to download at
>     “guix pull” time.

I agree that .go files are quite big (.scm files as well, but we’ve
improved information density somewhat by removing input labels :-)).

The size of .go files went down when we switch to the baseline compiler
(aka. -O1):

  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2020-06/msg00071.html

That thread has ideas of things to do to further reduce .go size.

Download size has to be treated separately though.  For example, ‘git
pull’ doesn’t redownload all of the repo or directory, and it uses
compression heavily.  Thus, a few hundred bytes of additional .scm text
translate in less than that.

As for the rest, download size can be reduced for example by choosing a
content-address transport, like something based on ERIS.

I think we must look precisely at what we want to optimize—on-disk size,
or bandwidth requirement, in particular—and look at the whole solution
space.

My 2¢!

Ludo’.