Atom installation contains 120+ identical executables in dugite-native package, wasting 270 MB disk space

[p-e-w]

This issue is a continuation of #18452 and desktop/dugite-native#138.

Edit by @rsese - see @shiftkey's comment at desktop/dugite-native#138 (comment) - an excerpt:

We tried ASAR ages ago and ended up just avoiding it (see desktop/desktop#476 and the linked PR for more info), and I see someone added support for being able to control the symlink behaviour (to opt-out of the default behaviour) in electron/packager#410.

Ultimately, this is up to the packaging apps rather than something I have control over. I don't see a derefSymlinks flag being set in the Atom packager config so maybe it's worth asking over in atom/atom if they've tried derefSymlinks when packaging.

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Prerequisites

Doesn't apply. This is not a runtime issue.

Description

The Git distribution bundled with dugite-native contains hundreds of symlinks used to create aliases such as git-imap-send. The way Atom is currently packaged emulates those symlinks by creating a full copy of the link target for each of them. This wastes 270 MB of disk space.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Install Atom
2. Look inside /node_modules/dugite/git/libexec/git-core in the installation folder
3. Notice there are 136 executables totaling 300 MB, 121 of which are identical (with different names)

Expected behavior: The Atom installer/installation doesn't waste disk space and bandwidth like that.

Actual behavior: Disk space and download bandwidth is wasted.

Reproduces how often: Always.

Versions

Edit by @rsese to note specific releases where there was a large increase in the size of the .rpm size and atom-mac.zip

For the .rpm, saw the 2x size increase from 1.30 where the .rpm was 134 MB and atom-mac.zip was 139 MB:

https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/tag/v1.30.0

And 1.31.0 where the .rpm size was 270 MB and atom-mac.zip was 272 MB:

https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/tag/v1.31.0

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1.32.2, at least macOS and Linux are affected, but likely all platforms.

Additional Information

None.

[zsol]

It wastes 270MB disk space twice: once inside the compressed asar (which is kept around for some reason), and once in extracted form

[rsese]

Thanks for opening a new issue with the template filled out @p-e-w, added a couple of notes to it.

[lock]

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