I installed the ControlSystems package and in order to do so about 300 MB of data was downloaded and 65000 files/directories were created. Can this be reduced to a more manageable size in terms of storage and number of files?
I thought maybe it was some setting in the package manager that could reduce the number of files that are installed. It looks like whole git repositories are copied. I am no expert in this, so apologies if my understanding is lacking.
I don’t think there is such an option in Pkg.add etc, but packages could of course implement such functioinality, eg controlled by environment variables. If you think this can be done for a specific package without compromising functionality, just open an issue there.
That said, 300 MB of data is not considered excessive these days in most environments if it is otherwise useful, so saving this may not be worth the programmer’s time.
OK. Thanks for your reply 
Note that with julias new package manager this will not be the case anymore, since we only download the released snapshot of the package and not the full history. (Yey Pkg3)