massive bloat: make something delete everything in ~/.sage/gap > 1 week old and untouched

[williamstein]

It is always safe to delete anything in ~/.sage/gap, since it will get autorecreated when Sage is started. I just looked at my ~/.sage/gap on sage.math and it is HUGE:

wstein@sage:~/.sage/gap$ ls -1 |wc -l
90
wstein@sage:~/.sage/gap$ du -sch .
1.3G .
1.3G total

I have stuff in there going back to March 2008.

The code in gap.py that creates the workspace in .sage/gap should also delete all old workspaces. I think 1 week is arbitrary, but is safe since as mentioned above any time length is safe.

Component: performance

Issue created by migration from https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/4936

[wdjoyner]

comment:1

I know there are GAP users who always load GAP via a workspace. I'm worried that if the only way to use GAP in Sage was to use a "recent" workspace then these users would not be well-werved.

A possible workaround would be if there was a way to optionally use a specific workspace. In other words, .\sage -gap and gap_console() could take an optional argument with a specific workspace. Does this seem reasonable? It might be rarely used, but it could be a potentially very useful feature to allow users to use another workspace.

[williamstein]

comment:2

I know there are GAP users who always load GAP via a workspace.
I'm worried that if the only way to use GAP in Sage was to use
a "recent" workspace then these users would not be well-werved.

This criticism of my suggestion doesn't make sense, because I'm only suggesting deleting the old workspaces in ~/.sage/gap/. Not all workspaces on the users computer or something. Anyway, I think your worry about makes no sense (to me). Please correct me if I'm wrong (quite possible). Thanks.

[williamstein]

comment:3

To test the attached patch, look $HOME/.sage/gap, and notice if you have a lot of old files there. Maybe even fake some old workspace files like this:

touch -t 01010000 workspace-00

Then touch local/bin/gap_stamp to force a recheck

cd SAGE_ROOT
touch local/bin/gap_stamp

and note that when you start sage the files you created in $DOT_SAGE/gap are deleted.

[mwhansen]

comment:4

Attachment: trac_4936.patch.gz

This works perfectly for me.

[sagetrac-mabshoff]

comment:5

Merged in Sage 3.3.alpha2