On the evils of software bloat

Today I found out that Gallery 2.3 was released about a week ago. It’s been a few years in the making and has some very needed upgrades and bug fixes. I had thought about this before but really realized today just how bloated a Gallery2 installation can be. The English-only installation has well over 2000 files that need to be uploaded to a server. Granted, it could all be done on the server with a tar ball, but it is easier for me to unzip it on my local machine and upload via ftp.

The full installation option (the one that comes will all of the languages pre-loaded) runs somewhere around 10000 files. Quite frankly, that’s a bit absurd. With so many files and so many subdirectories, it becomes unmanageable to even unzip the installation file.

Why does Gallery2 need so many files? I really couldn’t tell you although it looks like the vast majority of them are language files. The KISS principle doesn’t seem to be at play here. I haven’t been able to find out if this was actually created yet, but this language manager tool that was in the works a few years back sure seems like something nifty that could be very useful, especially for those of us who ended up with many large language packs cluttering up our installations. After all, I really don’t need to use the administrative interface in British English.

WordPress so far has managed to stay away from such a large bloating problem. It seems to have better management of how many files it requires on your webserver. However, I wouldn’t be surprised to see WordPress have the same fate befall it. Beware, WordPress, and take note Gallery2, it is REALLY annoying having to work with thousands upon thousands of files on my webserver.

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