Bug#910280: pandoc: Please reduce the binary size

[Горбешко Богдан <bodqhrohro@gmail.com>]

Package: pandoc
Version: 2.2.1-2
Severity: wishlist

Dear Maintainer,

the pandoc binary is extremely large. It's the largest file in my 
/usr/bin, exceeding even blender's binary in almost 2 times.

From my experience, ghc is not good at making small binaries, and even 
stripping doesn't do much. However UPX does it's job great on binaries 
produced by ghc. I tried compressing pandoc in --best mode and achieved 
14% compression (from 141M to 20M); however the compression took more 
than an hour on my system.

If you are afraid of performance decreasing that may arise because of 
UPXing, you can make pandoc a virtual package, pointing by default to a 
non-compressed real package, but providing a compressed real package as 
well, for those who care about disk space.



-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
  APT prefers oldoldstable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'oldoldstable-updates'), (500, 'oldoldstable'), 
(500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.18.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=ru_UA.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=ru_UA.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), 
LANGUAGE=ru_UA:ru (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages pandoc depends on:
ii  libc6        2.27-6
ii  libffi6      3.2.1-8
ii  libgmp10     2:6.1.2+dfsg-3
ii  liblua5.1-0  5.1.5-8.1+b2
ii  libpcre3     2:8.39-11
ii  libyaml-0-2  0.2.1-1
ii  pandoc-data  2.2.1-2
ii  zlib1g       1:1.2.11.dfsg-1

pandoc recommends no packages.

Versions of packages pandoc suggests:
pn  context                    <none>
ii  ghc                        8.2.2-4
ii  groff                      1.22.3-10
ii  libjs-mathjax              2.7.4+dfsg-1
pn  librsvg2-bin               <none>
pn  node-katex                 <none>
ii  nodejs                     8.12.0-1nodesource1
pn  pandoc-citeproc            <none>
ii  perl                       5.26.2-7
ii  php                        1:7.2+62
ii  php7.2 [php]               7.2.9-1
ii  python                     2.7.15-3
pn  r-base-core                <none>
ii  ruby                       1:2.5.1
ii  texlive-latex-extra        2018.20180824-1
ii  texlive-latex-recommended  2018.20180824-1
ii  texlive-luatex             2018.20180824-1
ii  texlive-xetex              2018.20180824-1
pn  wkhtmltopdf                <none>

-- no debconf information