Sugar and GTK updates

[Daniel Drake]

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 6:49 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> 2.  The system requirements (especially disk space) are affected more by
> changes in Fedora than changes in Sugar.  A large amount of disk space is
> taken up by files whose presence is unnecessary.  Customizing the build to
> exclude these files takes significant human effort to execute and test
> (see http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/4281), especially if the tradeoff is
> different for XO-1 vs. XO-1.5.

And just to build on this point a bit more...

The changes referred to in the mail that opened this thread - GTK3 and
PyGI - are not expected to be items of bloat. Rather the opposite.

Moving to PyGI is expected to reduce startup time and reduce memory
usage. No need for me to repeat Tomeu's arguments;
http://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2009/05/reducing-sugars-memory-usage.html

This move will also allow us to drop a load of bindings packages, as
the way PyGI works is that it allows python to call into C libraries
through only a small generic introspection layer, plus a few small
introspection data files. That will save some disk space.

Moving from GTK2 to GTK3 is not a significant change. The version
number bump was mostly for some internal restructuring and
backwards-incompatible API changes, the actual end result is not that
different from GTK2. Some things are faster and smaller, and GTK3 .so
size has dropped 0.2mb to 4.1mb size on my system. A few things might
be slightly slower, but the benchmarks I saw indicating this largely
blamed the GTK3 theme for the small performance losses (which Sugar
won't be using), and you won't notice it.

Right now we ship both Mozilla and webkit in our builds. Both steps
combined will allow us to drop mozilla, saving 30-50mb of disk space.
I'll let others jump in with the "and webkit is faster/better"
arguments!

Sugar is growing features, but nothing that I feel that challenges the
XO-1 at this point. The XO-1 images are big, and Fedora creep from
9-11 and 11-14 has hurt us a little, but we expect XO-1 deployments to
ship without GNOME (which several do, at least), so the issue isn't as
big as it appears.

Daniel