slimming icon theme caches

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-11-23 at 15:19 +0000, Daniel Drake wrote:
>> Previous OLPC OS builds (e.g. 8.2)  included this in the build script:
>>
>>     echo "  - Slimming unnecessary icon theme caches."
>>     # these are useful only if disk seeks take a long time.
>>     # rather than remove them completely, we rebuild them as index-only
>>     # (ie, don't duplicate all the icon image data in the cache)
>>     for f in $INSTALL_ROOT/usr/share/icons/*/icon-theme.cache ; do
>>       gtk-update-icon-cache -fi --quiet $(dirname $f)
>>     done
>>
>> This saved some disk space and presumably made olpc-update run a bit
>> quicker (this file tends to change on a rebuild even if nothing else has
>> changed).
>>
>> Does anyone have an opinion whether it's still relevant for XO-1.5?
>
> Looks like it originated from here:
> http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/4259
>
> Scott, do you have a minute to provide some input?
> I guess your opinion will be that we should continue to use index-only
> caches, given that we're still on flash memory?

Yeah, I still think they're unnecessary for a flash device.  Is it
important enough to be worth maintaining a fork?  Depends on whether
small updates via something like the update-system are still
important.

With a big more work, one could probably patch upstream so that the
cache maintains the timestamps of the original files, so that if the
icons aren't changed then the cache will be binary-identical every
time it's built.  This should be acceptable to upstream and would
result in the same update-system savings, although you'd still end up
wasting the flash space.
  --scott

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