[rkward-devel] mac preview

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le mercredi 11 janvier 2012 à 00:17 +0100, meik michalke a écrit :
> hi milan,
> 
> btw, if you didn't notice yet, the bundle package is already up:
>  o http://sourceforge.net/projects/rkwardextras/files/MacOSX/
> and i submitted the portfile to the MacPorts trac system, too. i'll add the 
> sources (1,2 GB) and some parts of the windows README to sf.net next.
> 
> Am Dienstag 10 Januar 2012, 12:39:28 schrieb Milan Bouchet-Valat:
> > Le lundi 09 janvier 2012 à 20:35 +0100, meik michalke a écrit :
> > > the bundle has a size of 810 MB (2,7 GB unpacked)
> [...]
> > Out of curiosity, why is the bundle so large? I didn't know R+Qt+KDE
> > libs were so heavy...
> 
> they aren't, at least not so much. it's partly the rest that gets drawn in 
> (e.g., the bundle currently includes a full gcc). there's much more in it than 
> is absolutely neccessary, which obviously leaves room for optimization here.
> 
> the bundle is made with the MacPorts tools, which work really great, i'm happy 
> to say! a port can specify other ports as dependencies, so if you install the 
> rkward-devel port, you'll get R and KDE ports installed as well, and they in 
> turn have some dependencies -- so much for a local installation.
> 
> to make a bundle, you first make this local installation, and then use the 
> port command to create an installable image from it. this will automatically 
> include the full dependency tree mentioned above, to guarantee that the bundle 
> will work.
> 
> what makes it so huge is that to have KDE in the bundle, rkward-devel depends 
> on kde4-baseapps -- that's one single port, so it's not trivial to strip off 
> parts you don't need. my guess is, we should either look at the bundle image 
> (it can be mounted and examined) and remove parts we don't really need after 
> it was built, or write our own kde4-baseapps-slim port and see if we can build 
> a much smaller KDE for our purpose in the first place. both approaches would 
> take some further amount of trial & error. for instance, i'm not sure how the 
> installer behaves if we just remove some parts of the package; that should be 
> rather simple though, as each component in the bundle is just a tar archive or 
> something.
Thanks for the explanation. I understand now that of course if the whole
KDE environment is included in the bundle, it will be quite heavy.  But
as you said, most KDE parts can probably be skipped; and you could also
get rid of gcc and build tools, if you consider most people won't need
to build packages from source. Another option would be to ask people to
install the R bundle first, I'm not sure how this works on Mac, but that
would avoid duplicating work and space.

> do you by any chance have a mac and can do some testing? if you have some 
> ideas, just shoot ;-)
I don't own a Mac, but I occasionally grab one of my friend's to test a
few things. So I can't really help with the bundle, sorry, but I'll be
able to check for bugs and report them.

I was mainly asking to get an idea of the progress RKWard can make on
OSX. I'd live to be able to use RKWard for text mining package I'm
writing, but for now I really need it to be cross-platform. When it
works fine on OS X and Windows, I'll probably port my package from Rcmdr
to RKWard. Let's dream... ;-)


Cheers