[Pkg-octave-devel] Bug#741097: octave: nox package of Octave

[Christian Himpe]

----- On Feb 2, 2018, at 1:03 AM, Mike Miller mtmiller at debian.org wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 01, 2018 at 12:13:40 -0800, Mike Miller wrote:
>> If this bug is still of interest, I think a useful first step would be
>> for someone to adapt the octave source package and add the appropriate
>> --without-X options. Once there are proof of concept binary packages
>> built without any graphical dependencies, then a useful disk usage
>> comparison can be done.
> 
> Here is an example of what I suggest interested parties can do quite
> easily. Modify the source package as in the attached example patch. This
> is not an example of a full solution, just a quick and dirty hack to
> build octave with no graphical dependencies. Note that this will also be
> a slightly crippled octave without any imread or imwrite capability.
> 
> With the resulting packages, I can compare the storage requirements in a
> clean minbase installation:
> 
>    # apt install --no-install-recommends octave
>    …
>    0 upgraded, 181 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
>    Need to get 88.3 MB of archives.
>    After this operation, 450 MB of additional disk space will be used.
> 
> versus
> 
>    # apt install --no-install-recommends ./octave_4.2.1-6_amd64.deb \
>                                          ./liboctave4_4.2.1-6_amd64.deb \
>                                          ./octave-common_4.2.1-6_all.deb
>    …
>    0 upgraded, 69 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
>    Need to get 29.9 MB/38.9 MB of archives.
>    After this operation, 167 MB of additional disk space will be used.
> 
> So I have saved about 280 MB in storage by dropping all graphical
> dependencies. That's about 5 MB in the octave binaries themselves and
> the rest in the dropped dependencies. Octave will not have a GUI, will
> not be able to plot anything, and will not be able to read or write
> image file formats.
> 
> Is 0.25-0.3 GB on the order of the savings you are looking for? Is it
> worth not being able to work with image files or plot anything, even
> headless plotting?
> 
> --
> mike

This is a relevant saving for tiny mass storage such as SD cards of 1-4GB.

For compute servers, it is worth, for just the reason that a server spin of a distribution is not becoming a desktop variant by adding the X and Qt stacks.

Thanks for your test

Christian Himpe
 
-- 
Christian Himpe
Computational Methods in Systems and Control Theory
Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems
Sandtorstr. 1
D-39106 Magdeburg
Germany