[Optimus One, P500, V General] Dovidhalevi:
The Gapps Adventure or ...

... how I found out where the space went and how I got it back :)

When I went from Froyo to CM9, I dutifully wiped everything, flashed the ROM and flashed the full April gapps. Went to play to restore my then Android-assistant in order to restore all my apps. Ran this until no more data space, moved some stuff to sdcard, restored more, no more space, etc., until my phone was back to where it was. Used ADW and Trebuchet. Since I had previously partitioned the sdcard, needed to use the partitions so discovered link2sd. Also graduated to Titanium.

Several upgrades to the CM9 ROM followed. I wiped the cashes and flashed them, but somehow neglected to reflash the gapps. Lo and behold, everything worked perfectly and nothing seemed to be missing. What gives? Phone had numerous gapps, play, drive, maps, streetview, etc., all working, and I did not flash them. I might not have had enough room to flash all that!

Anything that can be installed from Play or side-loaded as a user app does NOT go to system and should be installed this way for obvious reasons! The Play might have been side-loaded from XDA. Others were installed before CM9? Or moved later? I do not remember. CM9 made it easy to convert appropriate system apps to user apps and let link2sd get them out of the way. (Alas CM10 does not!) I started playing with this when all the discouraging discussion about system space for CM10 began and I was able to produced plenty system space.

I flashed the first CM10 (not Rashed's). Titanium was missing and Play did not work. Was advised to flash a new, small gapps. Did so, still did not work, so restored CM9. When I flashed build 3, I removed enough to fit the small gapps and flashed it. All OK.

But I still had all those gapps on the sdcard or sdext. Did not realize/remember this! Manually butchered build 4, flashed that and gapps and worked just fine. 36K system space left. Build 5, butchered even more and had 3 meg. Works fine (except for audio not working).

One can convert system apps to user apps in CM10 by moving the apk to /data/app and rebooting. If the initialization initializes the app, it is OK, if not or it does not run right, put it back. So ... play was already long off system, period. What else is on that mini-gapps? VoiceSearch and GoogleTTS had installed previously as user apps, are so once again. This leaves the Google Now QuickSearchBox/Velvet, the startup-wizard and libs that are not working on the Armv6. I use the GenieWidget so placed this manually, needs be on /system apparently. Next flash, I may try it naked like I used to. (If I do wipe data, it will be more work but still OK.) Need more, get them from Play or adb push them as needed.

I have 15 meg on system. Not what I once had, but not awful, not necessary even, just makes surgery easier. /system/usr/srec has long been symlinked to sdext. /system/media is now symlinked (though I do not know how ultimately desirable or profitable this be). Symlinking /system/fonts did not work, though a user-space solution through Trebuchet may be possible--I am using the CJK-less fonts, no Tamil, etc., but (as previously posted) I do not like this--Linux is international and Chinese should be usable.