GUI release contains a lot of unnecessary bits

[Gary Poster]

I posit that the point of the GUI release is to be able to serve the necessary JS (compressed, uncompressed, and tests), images, and other static files. There are no other uses.

Per original decision, we include a lot of other unrelated files. They help with running the files for testing, but they are a lot of cruft.

If this sort of thing would work (using the "h" option to dereference symlinks and then excluding unnecessary directories used only for building or symlinking)...

$ tar cJh --exclude=node_modules --exclude=app --exclude=build-shared --exclude=virtualenv --exclude=bin --exclude=archives -f tmp.xz juju-gui-0.9.0+build.992/

...then that cuts a hypothetical xz version (see bug 1218888) down by 81% (26965680 bytes to 5096652).

This less aggressive version still gets to the heart of things.

$ tar cJh --exclude=node_modules --exclude=virtualenv --exclude=bin --exclude=archives -f tmp.xz juju-gui-0.9.0+build.992/

That cuts it down by 80%, to 5483960 bytes in the xv version.