Now the closure of R is down from 5 GiB to 518 MiB, which is cool. :-)
It seems we might be able to go further, because somewhere there are
presumably unwanted dependencies being retained, such as Texinfo & Perl,
ld-wrapper & Binutils, Gawk and other build-time tools:
--8<---cut here
Ricardo Wurmus skribis:
> From 11e8a484733b492ff5ecd6119b9bdef238be6e67 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Ricardo Wurmus
> Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2015 11:41:07 +0200
> Subject: [PATCH 1/3] gnu: r: Drop IcedTea from inputs.
>
> * gnu/packages/statistics.scm (r)[inputs]: Remove "icedtea6".
[...]
> From
Ludovic Courtès writes:
> Speaking of which: should we get rid of icedtea6:jdk in the default R
> package (closure size: 1GiB), and maybe of TeX Live (4GiB)? Or should
> we provide, say, ‘r-light’ with the definition above?
>
> I’m afraid having these two dependencies by default makes it
> proh
