lightweigth win32 installations

[totaam]

Rather than having regular and "client" builds, with very little difference between them in terms of disk space:

$ du -sm \
    dists/windows/Xpra-Client-x86_64_Setup_5.0.4-r0.exe \
    dists/windows/Xpra-x86_64_Setup_5.0.4-r0.exe
123	dists/windows/Xpra-Client-x86_64_Setup_5.0.4-r0.exe
138	dists/windows/Xpra-x86_64_Setup_5.0.4-r0.exe

(the disk space actually used when installed is closer to 2GB, which is just ridiculous)

Split them into regular and "lightweigth" builds and remove more than just the server components: putty, remove all cuda and nvidia modules, all the video encoders, numpy (as long as pyopengl still works), ffmpeg codecs used by gstreamer, etc..
Use this as an exercise to also remove libraries we don't really need: clang / llvm?, libicu?, openblas, opencv, etc

This will also help with #4050

[totaam]

With this initial commit, the size of the "Minimal" builds are now just:

• installation directory: 181MB
• EXE: 49MB
• ZIP: 71MB

Because of the quickly diminishing returns, I think the bulk of the savings are already implemented.

Still TODO:

• rename to "Light" builds?
• gstreamer: remove video encoder, add build toggle for it?
• remove enc_rgb?
• start dialog missing
• update the upload and release scripts, wiki, etc..
• silence some warnings resulting from this trimming process - flag it?

[totaam]

This will have to do for v6, though some work on this is still needed:

• some form of backports for the egregious unnecessary weight
• similar trimming for the macos builds
• improvements to the SBOM records

Notes:

• no nvidia decoders, no cuda, no numpy
• no avif
• no gstreamer video decoders
• no encoders at all
• no webcam
• metadata removed
• some icons / fonts removed
  etc

Latest builds:

$ du -sm beta/windows/*r35267*
69	beta/windows/Xpra-Light-x86_64_6.0-r35267.zip
49	beta/windows/Xpra-Light-x86_64_Setup_6.0-r35267.exe
175	beta/windows/Xpra-x86_64_6.0-r35267.zip
126	beta/windows/Xpra-x86_64_Setup_6.0-r35267.exe

And the installed uncompressed size:

171	Xpra-Light-x86_64_6.0-r35267
383	Xpra-x86_64_6.0-r35267

@stdedos you may be interested in using these builds if you don't have any nvidia GPUs in your clients.

[totaam]

Comparing with v5.x at 1d716ad:

$ du -sm beta/windows/*5.0.8-r9.{exe,zip}
126	beta/windows/Xpra-Client-x86_64_Setup_5.0.8-r9.exe
141	beta/windows/Xpra-x86_64_Setup_5.0.8-r9.exe
177	beta/windows/Xpra-Client-x86_64_5.0.8-r9.zip
199	beta/windows/Xpra-x86_64_5.0.8-r9.zip

[totaam]

v5 is done and is almost as good as v6!

$ du -sm beta/windows/Xpra*5.0.8-r10*.{zip,exe}
78	beta/windows/Xpra-Light-x86_64_5.0.8-r10.zip
56	beta/windows/Xpra-Light-x86_64_Setup_5.0.8-r10.exe

However, v3.x is still absolutely massive:

$ du -sm Xpra*3.1.7-r77M*.{zip,exe}
349	/home/antoine/Shared/Xpra-Client-Python3-x86_64_3.1.7-r77M.zip
224	/home/antoine/Shared/Xpra-Client-Python3-x86_64_Setup_3.1.7-r77M.exe

And the installed size is ridiculous (almost 1TB!) - mostly because of opencv (#3336):

$ du -sm Xpra-Client-Python3-x86_64_3.1.7-r77M
973	Xpra-Client-Python3-x86_64_3.1.7-r77M

[totaam]

The big difficulty with 3.x is that we have to ship ffmpeg to be able to decode h264 (the dec_avcodec2 decoder), whereas v5.x has openh264.
And ffmpeg brings in tons of dependencies, big ones too, so the resulting installation was still over 800MB!
So much so that we used to build our own ffmpeg package with trimmed down dependencies (#3166), just like we still do on MacOS.
But this was just too much effort to manage properly.

So I've decided to also remove ffmpeg from the "light" builds in v3.x - vp8 / vp9 are decent alternatives anyway, and truly free too. One could consider backporting openh264 to this branch, as it is self-contained.
Anyone really needing h264 can use the fat builds, or even better: a newer version.

There are still a few more stray DLLs in this version than the newer branches, but the "Light" build size is now much more reasonable:

$ du -sm beta/windows/Xpra*r84*.{zip,exe}
107	beta/windows/Xpra-Light-Python3-x86_64_3.1.7-r84.zip
73	beta/windows/Xpra-Light-Python3-x86_64_Setup_3.1.7-r84.exe

Top level:

lib directory:

[totaam]

And within 24 hours of closing this ticket, an MSYS2 update brings in GStreamer version 1.24.0, which causes some new breakage - with a dialog alert box shown for every missing DLL!:

(Xpra_Audio.exe:1052): GStreamer-WARNING **: 20:48:51.306: \
    Failed to load plugin 'C:\Program Files\Xpra\lib\gstreamer-1.0\libgstd3d11.dll': The specified procedure could not be found.
(Xpra_Audio.exe:1052): GStreamer-WARNING **: 20:48:51.837: \
    Failed to load plugin 'C:\Program Files\Xpra\lib\gstreamer-1.0\libgstisomp4.dll': The specified procedure could not be found.
(Xpra_Audio.exe:1052): GStreamer-WARNING **: 20:48:53.017: \
    Failed to load plugin 'C:\Program Files\Xpra\lib\gstreamer-1.0\libgstd3d11.dll': The specified procedure could not be found.
(Xpra_Audio.exe:1052): GStreamer-WARNING **: 20:48:53.884: \
    Failed to load plugin 'C:\Program Files\Xpra\lib\gstreamer-1.0\libgstisomp4.dll': The specified procedure could not be found.

And even after looking at these DLLs using the dependency tracker, I have no idea what the problem is.

[totaam]

Though not as dramatic as v6, the 3.1.7 release got some significant weight loss:

du -sm Xpra*3.1.7*
73	Xpra-Light-Python3-x86_64_3.1.7-r0.msi
107	Xpra-Light-Python3-x86_64_3.1.7-r0.zip
72	Xpra-Light-Python3-x86_64_Setup_3.1.7-r0.exe
209	Xpra-Python3-x86_64_3.1.7-r0.msi
307	Xpra-Python3-x86_64_3.1.7-r0.zip
208	Xpra-Python3-x86_64_Setup_3.1.7-r0.exe

[stdedos]

@stdedos you may be interested in using these builds if you don't have any nvidia GPUs in your clients.

I do, but what's the benefit of "supporting" nvidia? CPU offload?

[totaam]

I do, but what's the benefit of "supporting" nvidia? CPU offload?

Very fast GPU encoding and decoding.
For a client, that means accelerated jpeg decoding via nvdec or nvjpeg.