I have a software package that I use at customer sites. The actual installer varies in size, but for instance, on Linux, the product RPMs, including docs, total about 8.6 megs.
So, the tarball contains this 8.6 megs for 5 different platforms of Linux (i686, x86_64, s39x, ppc glib2.2 and ppc glib3). That's what, about 45 megs for 5 platforms and 12 languages?
Now, understand, all 5 platforms are Linux. Scripts are pretty universal, so certain things would be 100% portable.
Also in the package are 26 text files, varying from 8 to 79 KILOBYTES, containing the product license agreement.
How much code would you expect these license texts would require to display on Linux?
10k, you might say, to have a menu, prompts, etc?
100k, you might say, for a gtk menu, widgets, etc?
No no.
105 megs.
Yes.
MEGABYTES.
Aparently, it's important to have four complete distributions of a Java virtual machine in order to display the menu.
Because, you know, it's portable.
And yah, libraries and the VM. The code itself was pretty small.