TASEmulators / TASEmulators/BizHawk
Have we reached the point of needing a bizhawk-minimal package?
Nobody has claimed this yet.
- Dominant language
- C#
- Stars
- 2.8k
- Forks
- 468
- PR merge metrics
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Description
The download size for BizHawk-win-x64 has doubled since 2.8, now surpassing 80 MiB compressed (see also #3505).
I think that, starting with this next release (2.10.1), we should offer an alternate, stripped-down download option. Since #3937 has stalled, this would have to be in addition to the full build. But compared to the frontend code changes that I suspect will be required, preparing 3 or 4 builds instead of 2 is a trivial matter.
Open questions:
- Which cores to omit?
- The obvious answer is "the largest ones", which per
unzip -v archived.zip | sort -nk3would mean MAME, DOSBox-X, Encore, and UAE, and that's the download size halved. - I'd add that we could also omit the 3 cores planned for deletion, any cores for fantasy consoles (TIC-80, Uzem), subframe cores, and cores which only exist to emulate a few titles (DSDA-Doom, Emu83, PicoDrive, Virtual Boyee...). I haven't run the numbers but that's probably another 10 MiB at least.
- The obvious answer is "the largest ones", which per
- Name?
- I have some notes from earlier, but tl;dr I'd be fine with the conventional
-minsuffix.
- I have some notes from earlier, but tl;dr I'd be fine with the conventional
- Linux? Nix?
- I don't see why Linux users shouldn't be given the exact same choice. Most of them will be manually downloading still, not that it would be difficult to copy-paste a
-minpackage. - The Nix expression can be left as-is. When I get around to finishing unmanaged cores from-source, the override for that can also be used to remove core binaries. Frontend jank is acceptable in that case.
- I don't see why Linux users shouldn't be given the exact same choice. Most of them will be manually downloading still, not that it would be difficult to copy-paste a
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
No implementation files or tests are named. Start by reproducing the archive size comparison with unzip -v archived.zip | sort -nk3, then review #3505, #3937, and the linked naming notes. Done means the core list, package name, supported platforms, and build/frontend changes are settled and an additional stripped-down package is produced alongside the full build.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- csharp
- Domain
- build-system, release
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100