>> On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 1:01 PM, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
>>
>> Vaguely remembered, mostly forgotten, quickly checked and claims to have cut 2Mb .. and it does indeed reduce the image size on disk. That’s also cut 7000 MCinfo-wotsits so we’re down to just 2500 (why are any left?) and a similar number of DateAndTime/Date/Time, so clearly they are tightly related.
>>  (Fun aside; inspecting MCVersionInfo allInstances, select one at random, ‘chase pointers’ - and a large list of updates start loading…. adding 13Mb to the image size. Yippee.)
>>
>> That's why nobody liked it. :-)
>
> It may be that Chris’s technique for dumping the ancestry was less than perfect, but I’d say the real problem would likely be the ancestry code. Is there any plausible reason for a ‘clean’ image to have 9000 version-doohickeys taking up a couple of MB?

Except for a proxy bug which needs fixed, I'd love to know how you
would possibly improve it even if you could do so by the mere snap of
your finger.  Because I wanted the best of both worlds.  I want 1) the
ability to clean / reduce an image, 2) WITHOUT losing the ability to
retrieve the ancestry.  Oh, and 3) it'd be nice if I didn't have to do
a special UI operation to "retrieve the ancestry", just have the
system retrieve it automatically please only if I do something in the
IDE that requires it.

Again, assuming all the proxy-bugs fixed, what more could one want in
terms of meeting all the demands we want as developers?