You might have noticed that I started working on cleaning up the tree (before I had a few problems with my system, but that’s for another day). Some people wondered whether that’s really going to make much difference, so I wanted to take a look at it myself. I was already quite sure that, while reducing the size of filesdir is important, especially to avoid more stuff to be added to the tree, getting rid of all the filesdir wouldn’t really make a terrible impact. Some extra time at hand, some find commands later, and Google Docs, lead to this:
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As you can see, the big part of the tree is ate up by the support files, more than twice the size of all the ebuilds; files/ directories are just little more than ebuilds, and there is a huge amount of filesystem allocation overhead, even if my tree is in a filesystem with 1 KiB blocks. Another interesting note is that the licenses use up more space than the whole set of profiles, scripts and eclasses!
For the sake of finding something to work on, let’s break up the support files class into a different graph:
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So much for those who complained that adding information about packages in metadata.xml is wasting space for users… the real space waster are change logs instead! But they are useful to keep around, for a while at least. I guess what we really need is better ChangeLog integration in repoman, so that a) it updates the ChangeLog on commit (stopping developers from committing without updating them!) and b) it can delete older and obsolete entries (like, keep the most recent 40 changes or so).
Update (2017-04-30): Unfortunately the spreadsheet links I used are now broken, so no graphs are available right now.