Kevin Brown wrote:
> 
> Don't know if it matters but I use Applixware from applix (www.applix.com) on my
> linux box.  With just the english dictionary and help files it is only around
> 100mb (the manual says 133MB, but since I don't use all the options it kept it

100MB?

Dictionaries arent exactly big files, either... A complete dictionary
for spelling check ought to fit on a 1.44MB floppy after mild
compression. Are the help files in PostScript or something?

Microsoft *could* make software that runs in a reasonable amount of
space (by todays standards) and yet is fully functional DTP software.
Just dig up a copy of MS Works for the Macintosh SE/30, from 1990 or
so. Of course, standards for software bloat were MUCH higher back then
than they have slipped to now, and, OK, no support for HTML or email,
but still... the fact that something like this did once exist, and the
people of a decade ago were also calling it bloatware from microsoft
... gives a little perspective to the current situation.

Excepting obvious excuses, like simply massive libraries of clipart, I
cant think of any legit reason for an office suite to occupy 100MB of
space. I removed WordPerfect after discovering that it was using half
that! Even the ever-bloated Netscape Communicator (Complete!) uses
around 37M after install, 12+M of which are for its absurdly buggy
implentation of Java, which takes the entire browser down when it
disagrees with some aspect of applets, at seemingly random times...

Can you give us a breakdown on the cause of the 100M size? if you do a 
ls -l `find -perm +a+x -type f`
in its install location, what files are over 500K? How big are they?
How about:
echo `ls -l \`find -perm +a+x -type f\` | cut -c 33-41` | sed s/"
"/"+"/g | bc
That will tell you the total number of bytes that are stored in
executable files. How big is this number?

I know one of the major causes of this waste of space is when each
little component of a suite includes the exact same code, over and
over, because of the way it was all put together. Compiling a simple
"hello world" program resulted in a 4470 byte executable. Another
"hello universe" program was 4473 bytes. A program that produces the
output of both of these programs uses 4501 bytes - but the two
programs, seperately, add together to 8943 bytes.... a result of the
redundancy of having two copies of stdio.h instead of one, among other
things.



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