Re: shrink GTK+ disk usage for Windows

[Andrew Ziem <ahz001 gmail com>]

On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 4:16 AM, Alexander Shaduri <ashaduri gmail com> wrote:
>> Wow, using Linux 'strip -v bin/*' cuts the bin directory from 16M to
>> 9.3M!  After UPX, it's down to 3.9M (compare to 7.8MB below).
>
> Keep in mind that I had some problems with Linux version of strip
> when running it on windows dlls.
> I think the mingw version (usually called i386-pc-mingw32-strip or similar)
> is better in that regard.
> Also, it's usually safe to use --strip-debug and --strip-unneeded
> on libraries, but simply using strip without arguments will damage them.

This pointed me in a helpful direction.  I was able to aggressively
strip most of GTK+ except zlib1.dll.  I also removed many unneeded
files, and I mixed some old versions of the GTK+ binaries/dependencies
to avoid shipping the large freetype6.dll.  All this saved me about
500KB in the compressed installer compared to my previous installer.

Details in the links:

http://bleachbit.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/bleachbit/misc/gtk-unpack.sh?revision=1736&view=markup

http://bleachbit.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/bleachbit/misc/gtk-download.sh?revision=1735&view=markup

One surprise is Python's *.pyd files can be stripped and compressed
with UPX, but they are smaller compressed without stripping.

I'd still like to shrink GTK+ more.  I downloaded the GTK+ source and
looked at './configure --help' looking for a switch to disable parts
of GTK+ that I don't use (such as the file chooser, for example), but
I don't see anything like that.

John,

>I should try again: the WIndows build of my app works in Wine now
>(woo!) so it's a lot easier for me to test.

Good tip.


Best regards,
Andrew