On Sat, Aug 7, 2010 at 1:22 PM, Rene Ladan <r.c.ladan@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm also planning to not include the build directories for the FreeBSD
> port(s). For the core ROS system, the build directories take up 311MB
> out of 466MB (67%), while the .svn directories (not part of the final
> port) take up 22MB (4.7%). This means the core ROS system itself would
> only take up about 133MB (source + binaries).

See Brian's e-mali re: certain misbehaving packages. You will have to
be careful about which packages you purge, though we are working on
making this work universally.

> What is the purpose of the test directories? Are they only used to
> self-test the freshly built system to see if it is production-ready?

The test directory has:
 1) the rostest package, which is an important tool integration testing
 2) test_package packages, which are unit/integration tests for the
ROS packages themselves.

(1) we leave in because it is a general tool. (2) we leave in because
it is often a valuable way of detecting platform incompatibilities. We
could filter out (2), but it's not really big enough in comparison to
other issues to have warranted much attention.

I'm a little confused by your numbers. My binary install of ROS is
only 150MB and that includes source+binaries+build directories. The
only build directories > 1MB are gtest (9MB) and wxswig (32MB). Is
there something different about the FreeBSD builds?

 - Ken