On Tue, 20 Jun 2000, Dan Ingalls wrote:
[snip]

> I go through the process you described with most major releases to
> check that majorShrink is reasonably effective.  As you discovered, it
> is out of date right now.  However the last time we had it running
> right, it would produce a system with all normal browsers and MVC in
> about 700k.  I'm out of town, but if no one has succeeded here
> already, I'll do this after 7/1, and document the hard parts of the
> process (mostly identifying causes for obsolete classes, and dealing
> with certain large global structures (such as flaps ;-)).

Dan:

May I suggest that there be a few "major" shrink points? For example, I
definitely want to be able to deploy a "server" image...which needn't be
the smallest there could be. Similarly, I've wanted to make a fairly teeny
network *client* so I can distribute a custom browser/mailer/irc client to
students.

The last time I attempted a shrink, I noticed that there were a lot of
'system specific' shrink methods (that would strip, e.g., morphic, or
networking), but it struck me that there were sensible larger chunks that
might be commonly enough desired that making it a single doit would be
very useful.

(Assuming we can define such images. A development server, a headless
server, and a net client are the three I can think of off hand. Heck, it
would be great to have such for downloading! I would happily steward one
or two of these. Indeed, having a server image with all or most of the
various server goodies and packages itself would be very nice.)

It seems that the best time to essay this is when validating the general
super-shrink. But perhaps your documenting of that process will suffice to
let the rest of us pitch it?

Are there other sensible "less that the whole/more than the
minimun" configurations people are interested it? Finding those choice
points might also allow for a courser grained first cut at breaking apart
the image, which probably is a somewhat easier task.

Just some idle musing :)

(If there are other definite configurations folks have needs/desires for,
both with subtractions and with additions, perhaps we could start up a
swiki page to try to define them. Personally, I'd take some "fat" in my
images if it means I can just download or distribute something
*generally* smaller.)

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.