[17430] in Athena Bugs
Re: Star Office office suite installed on Athena
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Sat Dec 18 09:09:40 1999
Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 09:09:30 -0500 (EST)
Message-Id: <199912181409.JAA26200@mary-kay-commandos.mit.edu>
To: Alex T Prengel <alexp@mit.edu>
Cc: 3partysw@mit.edu, bugs@mit.edu
In-reply-to: "[317] in Software_Announce"
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
Hello,
I did some investigation into the problem of "star office eats
3mb of users' quota/platform", and have concluded that there is
definitely room for improvement. It particular, it appears that
a significant number of the files that Star Office installs in each
homedir are read-only files that are never modified, and can be
replaced with symlinks to a common directory (in afs).
Attempting to classify all the different Star Office pieces
into "configuration, modifyable" and "read-only" is quite a task,
and at some point one reaches diminishing returns. However,
if you examine the "du" output, under Solaris at least, and
check out the top space consumers:
3006 ./config
1598 ./store
784 ./config/symbol
776 ./autotext
430 ./config/help
342 ./bin
126 ./explorer
94 ./xp3
Some of them are clearly wholesale read-only. Like "config/symbol"
which contains 384 .BMP bitmap files for icons. "autotext" appears to
be template files that are unmodified. Right there, that's 800K.
It's not clear to me whether "store" is read-only or not. It looks
like it might be. If so, then we've cut the footprint in half.
At some point we probably reach diminishing returns with respect to
the effort involved to save a few kilobytes across however many users
there are of the package. But when we can save megabytes, it seems to me
that it is worth it.
I'd suggest the right way to test this is to symlink all the
candidates to a directory in afs that cannot be written to be the user
running Star Office, and then run Star Office under truss (strace for
linux) and see what files it tries to touch that it cannot...
--jhawk
