Red Hat Diaries/0011

File Sizes

Apple Mail is very cool too. It lets you bounce messages back. I tested this and the return diagnostics are very good. I tried bouncing a few spams. They didn't come back (DUH). I don't know if it does any good, but it's cool. And maybe some netadmin somewhere will find this ping-pong thing going on and intervene and discover his servers are acting as spam relays. I don't know - but it's a possibility I suppose. Anyway, it's cool.

Files with the extension 'app' are weird. This is the extension normally used for applications. But they're not files at all - they're directories. This is very weird. Take Adobe Acrobat Reader for example. According to Finder, this monster is 76.6MB on disk - which even considering the considerable lack of talent at Adobe is a lot. What's up?

You go back into your own system with a normal login. Use the Terminal application. Get an ordinary Unix prompt. Start navigating around. You discover that Acrobat.app is not a file at all, but a directory. Actually a directory tree - with lots and lots of sub-directories thrown in.

The Acrobat executable per se is not that bad, not as far as Adobe goes - about a megabyte on disk. There are a few system modules which might not need to be there, but at least they're not overwriting the actual system modules in the proprietary system areas. Most of the bulk is in - get this - help files, each in its own sub-directory, each categorised according to language. And there are about a zillion languages represented, and each help file is about a megabyte. Go figure.

I guess one could reasonably delete the language sub-directories one does not need and regain a lot of disk space, but I am going to wait a bit before doing that. Anyway, I wonder if it's absolutely necessary to install all these language modules - if the install system could not instead determine the language in use on the local machine and then just dump the corresponding help file on disk and no more.

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