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Now I'm kind of curious. The GHC is listed there as being 113 megabytes. When I try to install it on Arch Linux, the size is listed as 736MB! What in God's name

by jeorgun 13y ago

Now I'm kind of curious. The GHC is listed there as being 113 megabytes. When I try to install it on Arch Linux, the size is listed as 736MB! What in God's name is Arch doing to nearly septuple the size of this package— and more to the point, does anyone know any way of getting it to not do that? I'd very much like to learn Haskell, but taking up that much space on my laptop's SSD is a dealbreaker.

thoughtpolice 13y ago
That's because they're measuring the tarball, which is a worthless metric anyway (for example, we just switched to supporting .tar.xz, which reduced the size of Linux binary distributions close to 50% for a ~65MB total. But that doesn't tell you anything about what's inside.) The unpacked binary distribution is closer to 1GB, which sounds about right. I speculate Arch Linux is doing a regular build with nothing special. If 1GB is undoable for your laptop (which I find odd, as someone even on a 100GB device), then that's unfortunate. You're best to wait for some other build with things removed or to just build it yourself (for example, no dynamic linking).