[maemo-developers] Optification (was Re: PyMaemo (Python for Maemo) final release for Maemo 5 (Fremantle))

[From: Anderson Lizardo]

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 12:11 PM, Andrew Flegg <andrew at bleb.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 16:00, Anderson Lizardo
> <anderson.lizardo at openbossa.org> wrote:
>>
>> The PyMaemo team is pleased to announce the final release of PyMaemo
>> for Maemo 5!
>
> BTW, I've tested with bind mounts and /opt.
> [...]

Nice to hear that! We decided to leave out the optification for the
final release, just not to delay it even more. But now I believe we
can work on it as an update through extras-devel (I just hope that
that QA process will take any possible regressions with the new
packages we upload).

> I've done the following and it seems to work well:
>
>   * Created /opt/python2.5/lib
>   * Moved the contents of /usr/lib/python2.5 to /opt/python2.5/lib
>   * Created an init script, symlinked to S20python-optify, which does
>     (on start):
>
>        mount --bind /opt/python2.5/lib /usr/lib/python2.5
>
> This freed up lots of space on the rootfs and does not seem to have
> impacted start-up time of Python apps particularly noticably.
>
> I can share the startup/shutdown script and maybe even package this as
> a "Python Optifier" if you want.

Do you think it can be made a generic dh_* like tool that handles this
automatically? This way it could be called from debian/rules as e.g.:

maemo-python-optify /usr/lib/python2.5

and the init scripts be generated automatically. What do you think?

> I think this is one of the best ways of optifying Python and without
> any patches. I'd suggest this gets included in the next release of
> PyMaemo.

Did you do any kind of upgrade tests? I'm worried how that would work
if you are upgrading from an older non-optitified python installation.

I also suppose that this implicitly moves files from other packages to
/opt/python2.5 ? E.g. from python-hildon, python-gtk2 etc. ?

What about the /usr/bin/python2.5 binary (which takes some MB) did you
move it to /opt too?

Regards,
-- 
Anderson Lizardo
OpenBossa Labs - INdT
Manaus - Brazil