IDE Download getting large; need to develop an incremental download plan

[tigoe]

The Arduino IDE download is getting large as we add more toolchains, libraries and examples. While these components are helpful, it makes the initial download huge. We should develop a scheme to reduce this, perhaps by using incremental downloads.

Starting with an initial download that has only the AVR toolchain, then allowing you to incrementally add the Due toolchain dynamically would help.

A library manager (already in discussion on the dev list) will help reduce the size of the initial download, and allow users to pick and choose which libraries they include. Similarly, perhaps an example manager would help as well.

What other elements could be made modules and implemented as an incremental download?

[damellis]

It would definitely be good to decrease the size of the applications and the downloads.

I think the sizes of the individual toolchains can be slimmed down as well. For example, the AVR toolchain includes a 3.x and a 4.x version of AVR-GCC. This was intended (by the makers of WinAVR / CrossPack) to make it easy to switch between the two but I don't think any Arduino users do. Deleting the 3.x version would save a decent amount of space, I think. Also, the packages include some amount of documentation for the toolchains, additional binaries that we don't use, etc. We might start by cleaning these toolchains up and seeing how much room that saves.

[PaulStoffregen]

The Mac AVR toolchain could drop PPC support, cutting the binary file sizes roughly in half, as well as dropping the old toolchain version nobody ever uses.

The Windows AVR toolchain contains many unused programs, including 2 copies of gdb, tcl/tk, avarice, and 38 megabytes of toolchain documentation.

Even the relatively small Linux version contains some easily trimmed fat, like 2 copies of avrdude and toolchain files never used by the IDE, like avr-addr2line, avr-strings, avr-c++filt, etc.

[ffissore]

That's what we get so far
linux: from 79M (395M uncompressed) to 56M (193M uncompressed)
macosx: from 126M(390M uncompressed) to 120M(370M uncompressed)
windows: from 95M(403M uncompressed) to 83M(363M uncompressed) (the expert version, the one without the included JRE)

keeping the issue open for now

[ffissore]

With pull request #1806, nightly builds show the following changes
linux32: from 60M to 66M
linux64: from 61M to 66M
macosx: from 127M to 87M
windows: from 132M to 121M

[ffissore]

Fixed since 1.6.2