[SOLVED] Is the mingw folder necessary?

[trev]

1) FP text IDE is ALWAYS shipped with Free Pascal Compiler, and has nothing to do with releases of Lazarus, to answer your question on another topic (future laz release 2.0.8 )

The FP text mode IDE is most definitely NOT shipped with the macOS Free Pascal Compiler installer.

[GypsyPrince]

Hardware:

2 TerraByte Harddisks (internal) are now below 60.- €

That is 3 Cent per Gigabyte.

While I consider you a friend, this attitude bothers me every time I see it expressed in forums and blog articles - which is quite often. LOL
 
It's much like the venture capitalist's philosophy: "Who cares about finite resources? Let's plunder the earth and destroy the environment. Continued human existence is less important than making money right now."
 
This particular mindset translates to computer speak like this: "Rather than streamline and optimize our code and techniques each time computers multiply in power so that we can capitalize on their speed and efficiency as was intended, we should instead, bog them down with bloat to where they are no longer any faster than the generation of systems that came before... simply because storage capacity is cheap."

Because I am used to working with embedded and secured military systems where storage space is at a premium, I'm used to taking the opposite approach of constant optimization and getting rid of unnecessary bloat.
 
Besides... my laptop is already maxed out with the largest HDD its BIOS will allow. This is the real reason. All the previous nonsense was just to keep in practice my skills at useless bloviating and ranting. LOL

[marcov]

It's much like the venture capitalist's philosophy: "Who cares about finite resources? Let's plunder the earth and destroy the environment. Continued human existence is less important than making money right now."

Human labour is a finite resource too. It translates to a living wage and all the upkeep that comes with that.

So then it is not absolute over the other, but a tradeoff to minimize resource usage.

[Martin_fr]

I have not tested this, but if you want to save space, it may be an idea to rebuild packages....

Afaik the pre-compiled packages (except for what is in the FPC folder) come with debug info. That eats into space. If you do not intend to debug into the LCL, you can rebuild this.
In all folders, EXCEPT any folder inside the FPC folder, remove all *.ppu and *.o files

Make sure debug info settings are off for each individual package.
Make sure Tools > Config build IDE  does not have any debug info (-gw -gs -g...) set

Next rebuild of your project will take a bit longer, as it recreates some of the deleted files.

There may be some files that are not recreated, if they are not needed by your project(s). So that would save space.
I guess (but really not tested) that the recreated files may be smaller.

Each time you install a package you rebuild the IDE, that leaves ppu for the IDE (and IDE only packages). So you need to clean out again.
It is full intend they are left behind.
It save cpu time for the next build. And with that it save energy and is better for the environment. (Well that depends how long you keep them till the next package install, and how big the impact on producing the extra storage is / assuming you can otherwise re-use the storage for other purposes....)

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No idea if or how much that will save...

[GypsyPrince]

@Martin_fr

I wound up uninstalling a couple of old development tools I don't plan on using anymore.

Got plenty of room now.  I'll be buying myself a new laptop (with much larger SSD) as a gift to myself when I retire in June.