gconf wastes a lot of space on defaults schemas files

[Phillip Susi]

Binary package hint: gconf2

On my system there are 65 MB of files in /var/lib/gconf2/defaults. The majority of that space consists of whitespace indentation of the xml files. Simply replacing every sequence of 8 space characters with a hard tab character cuts this size in half. Removing all leading whitespace completely ( humans aren't really supposed to look at these files anyhow, so who cares if they are nicely indented? ) saves even more space.

What's more, these files appear to contain schema descriptions in every possible language, when I only use English. Not only that but all this data appears to be compiled from files in /usr/share/gconf/schemas, causing duplication of the data.

Possible fixes include:

1) Using hard tab characters instead of 8 spaces for indentation
2) Eliminating the indentation completely
3) Eliminating the extra languges
4) Keeping /var/lib/gconf2/defaults/* in a .tar.bz2 that can be decompressed on the fly ( my 65 MB compressed down to ~3.8 MB )
5) Reading the files in /usr/share/gconf/schemas directly instead of copying the information to /var/lib/gconf2/defaults
6) Removing the files in /usr/share/gconf/schemas once it has been merged into /var/lib/gconf2/defaults

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported, but feel free to report any other bugs you find.