This is all heuristic (read "guessing") and not a real solution to the problem. The ground truth is that software bloat isn't bad enough of a problem for softw

This is all heuristic (read "guessing") and not a real solution to the problem. The ground truth is that software bloat isn't bad enough of a problem for software developers to try and fight it. We already know how to prevent this, if really want to. And if the problem was really hurting so much, we'd have automated ways of slimming down the executables / libraries. In my role in creating CI for Python libraries, I did more hands-on dependency management. My approach was to first install libraries with pip, see what was installed, research why particular dependencies have been pulled in, then, if necessary, modify the packages in such a way that unnecessary dependencies would've been removed, and "vendor" the third party code (i.e. store it in my repository, at the version I need). This, obviously, works better for programs, where you typically end up distributing the program with its dependencies anyways. Less so for libraries, but in the context of CI this saved some long minutes of reinstalling dependencies afresh for every CI run. In the end, it was a much better experience than what you usually get with CI targeting Pyhon. But, in the end, nobody really cared. If CI took less than a minute to complete instead of twenty minutes, very little was actually gained. The project didn't have enough CI traffic for this to have any actual effect. So, it was a nice proof of concept, but ended up being not all that useful.