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

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

ext Anderson Lizardo wrote:
> 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?

Are you suggesting that each python package would themselves do
the bind mount?  And hide anything that was before in that directory?

Saner solution is that the bind mount is done by something from which
the package depends from (be it python package itself or something
else).


>> 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?


	- Eero