trim dist

[JeffBezanson]

There is a lot of unnecessary stuff in make dist:

• static libraries. I don't think they are needed.
• readline libraries. I believe we statically link them so they shouldn't need to be distributed.
• 3 copies of libarpack named .so, .so.2, and .so.2.0.0. Might be a problem in the arpack build, copying instead of making links perhaps.
• 20MB of unicode test files. make install specifically runs make -C test/unicode. Why?

We could also remove the docs, since they are available online.

[tshort]

i prefer leaving the docs in, so they're usable locally (for searching for example).

[ViralBShah]

Yes, we should include the docs in dist, but rest all should be fixed. For docs, we should also include a pdf of the docs in the distribution.

[ViralBShah]

I think we can close this, since we got our major gains from generating the unicode files on the fly, rather than packaging them. @JeffBezanson Unless you strongly feel about all the other stuff you mention, could you close this?

[JeffBezanson]

No, we can't close this until we stop packaging multiple copies of libraries, or anything else that is not needed.

[ViralBShah]

For the static libraries, the simplest thing to do is to rm *.a in the directory containing the tarball. readline could also be deleted at the same time.
The multiple copies are probably due to the use of cp -R in make install.

[JeffBezanson]

cc @staticfloat
This is still happening. make dist ships 2 copies of openblas, 3 copies of fftw, 4 copies of GMP, etc.
see also #6711

[IainNZ]

related perhaps: I just downloaded rc-4 today (on OSX) and it was ~50MB bigger than a 60 day old nightly I had been using

[Keno]

We also recently added debug symbols for release builds. I like this when building from source, but for distributions it might make sense to strip them.

[tkelman]

Is there a point to having separate julia and julia-debug if both have debug symbols included? I think the osx nightly from 60 days ago also was using accelerate instead of openblas

[tknopp]

@tkelman: Sorry if this is a dump question but are the debug symbols in a release build really valid? How can that be when the optimizer moves statements wildly around...

[staticfloat]

@JeffBezanson We get multiple copies because install doesn't know how to deal with symlinks. I'm working on it.

Debug symbols shouldn't be adding anything significant to the download size. We're duplicating every library that has a tiered versioned name. Copying these as symlinks instead of files should cut down our install size significantly.

OSX nightlies will necessarily be at least 30MB larger now that we're packing OpenBLAS alongside.

[tkelman]

Before the debug symbols were added to it, libjulia.dll was 15 MB on Windows, now it's 50. There's actually no point in using julia-debug on Windows right now because of #7982

@tknopp I believe the optimizer flags are still different between libjulia and libjulia-debug, so hard to say.

[staticfloat]

@tkelman That's pretty different from other platforms. On Linux, for example, libjulia.so is currently 21MB. If I strip it, it drops down to 16MB. On OSX, the debugging information is stored externally, in a libjulia.dylib.dSYM directory, which totals 8.4MB.

[staticfloat]

PR for fixing some of these issues here: #8024