Create a new option: "sage -strip" which deletes things that aren't needed for a binary distribution of sage, or for people that will never develop or upgrade

[williamstein]

This is a frequently requested feature. We should start with some little script that does this, and build on it. I tried all the following, and ran the test suite and it worked fine.

• rm SAGE_ROOT/local/lib/*.a
• rm SAGE_ROOT/devel/sage/build/lib.*
• rm SAGE_ROOT/devel/sage/build/temp.*
• strip SAGE_ROOT/local/bin/Singular-* SAGE_ROOT/local/bin/gfan # gfan is a huge win.
• jsmath image fonts are in MoinMoin and are HUGE. Just delete everything related to moinmoin...
• strip SAGE_ROOT/local/lib/*.so
• rm -rf SAGE_ROOT/local/python/site-package/MoinMoin
• rm all files in SAGE_ROOT/devel/sage/sage/ that begin "* Generated by Cython" (I didn't do that)

---

The patches below actually provide a new make target, "micro_release", rather than adding a new option to sage.

---

Apply attachment: trac_10801-root_repo.patch to the Sage root repository.

Apply attachment: trac_10801-local_bin_repo.patch to the Sage scripts repository.

CC: @jasongrout @kcrisman

Component: packages: standard

Keywords: sd32

Author: William Stein, Keshav Kini

Reviewer: Benjamin Jones, Keshav Kini

Merged: sage-4.7.2.alpha3

Issue created by migration from https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/10801

[jasongrout]

comment:1

It seems like the LiveCD folks have also worked on stuff like this...

[kini]

comment:2

If we mount a sage source installation with mount option strictatime or relatime we can just touch all the files to have an access time in the deep past (with something like cd $SAGE_ROOT ; for x in $(find) ; do touch -ad "1981-02-03 04:05:06" ; done), then run the whole doctest suite, then use stat() to find files which were unused. This should give us a good idea of what is never used. Unfortunately this does not seem possible on sage.math - POSIX atime is not respected in my homedir, probably as it is mounted over NFS...

[williamstein]

Description changed:

--- 
+++ 
@@ -7,5 +7,5 @@
 - jsmath image fonts are in MoinMoin and are *HUGE*.  Just delete everything related to moinmoin...
 - strip SAGE_ROOT/local/lib/*.so
 - rm -rf SAGE_ROOT/local/python/site-package/MoinMoin 
-- rm all files in SAGE_LOCAL/devel/sage/sage/ that begin "* Generated by Cython"  (I didn't do that)
+- rm all files in SAGE_ROOT/devel/sage/sage/ that begin "* Generated by Cython"  (I didn't do that)
 

[sagetrac-pi]

comment:4

if you're using linux, take a look at inotify-tools which has nice and clean command line tools, as it will give you a more fine-grained and realtime sense of what files are being used as they are accessed/modified to track down what's being used by which calls/tests/parts of sage.

[jhpalmieri]

comment:5

We can probably remove any Mercurial repositories.

[kini]

comment:7

Here's some data I collected about what files are used and what files aren't, in sage 4.7.alpha3. Surprisingly many aren't, but come to think of it there's going to be a lot of stuff that users would want which isn't used by any doctest. I guess one should think of this data as a lower bound...

[sagetrac-mhampton]

comment:8

Why is it OK to delete SAGE_ROOT/local/bin/gfan?

[kini]

comment:9

Not delete, but strip. This removes debug symbols.

[nexttime]

comment:10

Slightly related: sage -crap ... (local/bin/sage-crap)

Note that we already have a few *clean targets in the top-level Makefile; there could be more (like strip), and some of the others could perhaps get improved or extended.

I personally wouldn't use -strip for anything else than really stripping debug symbols, i.e., if it is e.g. intended to delete also static libraries (which may be needed if someone installs some package, not necessarily an spkg), I'd choose a different name for such an option (or make target).

[williamstein]

comment:11

After a long discussion, Keshav and I came up with:

   make micro_release

since this is a lot like "make release" with other software....

[williamstein]

comment:12

Replying to @sagetrac-mhampton:

Why is it OK to delete SAGE_ROOT/local/bin/gfan?

I didn't suggest deleting gfan, but stripping it.