OpenBLAS package slimming

[jaakkor2]

Downloading big jll packages can be problematic with unreliable network connections as described in https://discourse.julialang.org/t/install-binary-package-such-as-openblas-jll-via-very-slow-internet-connection . One way to improve the situation could be trimming the size of the package.

OpenBLAS_jll could be slimmed by (I am referring to the Windows version)

• removing static libs (*.a) files in lib-directory 84 MB
• removing logs/OpenBLAS.log 5.8 MB

OpenBLAS.v0.3.7.x86_64-w64-mingw32-libgfortran5.tar.gz would go from 27 MB to 8 MB proving a speedup for downloading, and disk space would go s from 123.7 MB to 33.6 MB.

[giordano]

The log files are very important. Also, they're plain text, usually they can be compressed pretty well. Static archives are less important instead6

[davidanthoff]

If some of this stuff is important to have for the folks that build these packages, couldn't there be to archives created, one that includes things like log files, and a second one that doesn't that is actually deployed to user systems that really only has what is needed?

[haampie]

I don't really understand where you get those numbers @jaakkor2? E.g. https://github.com/JuliaBinaryWrappers/OpenBLAS_jll.jl/releases has

 OpenBLAS.v0.3.7.x86_64-w64-mingw32-libgfortran3.tar.gz
26.4 MB
OpenBLAS.v0.3.7.x86_64-w64-mingw32-libgfortran4.tar.gz
26.6 MB
OpenBLAS.v0.3.7.x86_64-w64-mingw32-libgfortran5.tar.gz
26.4 MB

Edit, sorry, I just looked at the uncompressed number of 84MB, nevermind.

---

I also tried stripping the shared libraries, that saves just a hair:

lib $ cp libopenblas64_.0.3.7.so libopenblas64_.0.3.7.so_
lib $ strip --strip-all ./libopenblas64_.0.3.7.so
lib $ du -sh libopenblas64_.0.3.7.so
29M	libopenblas64_.0.3.7.so
lib $ du -sh libopenblas64_.0.3.7.so_ 
30M	libopenblas64_.0.3.7.so_

maybe not worth it.

[haampie]

With #621's change locally on x86_64 + libgfortran.so.4 I get

lib $ du -sh ../../openblas_tmp.tar.gz 
5.2M	../../openblas_tmp.tar.gz

😌

[jaakkor2]

Fixed by #621. Thanks!

OpenBLAS.v0.3.9.x86_64-w64-mingw32-libgfortran5.tar.gz is 8.84 MB, about 3x improvement.