Patrick's playground

Today I wanted to fetch a new stage3. And I had many disappoint: Sooo big. 200MB for a stage3?
So I started cutting things up and filed some bugs, and the results are nice:
Starting point: stage3-amd64-20141127

Original:   207758877 bytes / 199M
Shrinked-1: 165755734 bytes / 159M
Shrinked-2: 161092189 bytes / 154M
Shrinked-3: 112635928 bytes / 108M
Shrinked-4: 109833196 bytes / 105M

What changed?
First step: Remove two of three python implementations. I think having only python2 is enough for a start - that's a bit over 150MB unpacked just gone.
Changes needed: PYTHON_TARGETS and USE="-python3" during build

Second: Build pkgconfig with USE="internal-glib". This removes the dependency on glib and its mad ball of dependencies for another ~40MB on-disk.

Repacking that gives Shrinked-1
Then I noticed that Python installs tests unconditionally. This is not needed at runtime and barely needed at buildtime, for another 28MB saved. That's Shrinked-2.

Shrinked-3 is Shrinked-1 with xz instead of bzip2; Shrinked-4 is Shrinked-2 with xz instead of bzip2.

So there, within a few minutes I've halved the size of the tarball by pruning unneeded bits ...