Debian 10 bloats like a balloon (was: Control Debian image size)

["W. Martin Borgert" <debacle@debian.org>]

On 2019-03-03 10:48, W. Martin Borgert wrote:
> If there is a small number of huge packages you can't avoid,
> try to rebuild them with less features and/or less
> dependencies.

I'm currently at moving an older embedded system from Debian 6
(squeeze) to Debian 10 (buster). Which eats a lot of the flash
and all of the RAM. Also, boot time doubled. Just some examples
how Debian changed in the last years:

Binary\Debian      6 (squeeze)  10 (buster)
init¹                      0.1          1.2
ModemManager               0.4          1.2
NetworkManager             0.6          2.3
Python²                    2.3          4.2
/usr/lib/ + /lib/         92.0        247.0

¹ upstart -> systemd
² Python 2 -> Python 3

Those are the executables, not packages sizes, which might be
even larger.

Also, new dependencies in the chain led to 300 instead of 200
depending packages for the same application.

One way out of this is compiling packages with different compile
options and less dependencies. E.g. libxml2 has a new
dependency, libicu63. Leaving it out frees 30 MiB! libicudata.so
is the single largest library on that system and not needed.

I'm happy about reading more ideas here, how to unbloat buster.

TIA & Cheers