How much does an alternative contribute to file size?

If you want determine how much a particular alternative contributes to the overall size of a .ds file, use these debug methods...

_block
   _local v << gis_program_manager.cached_dataset(:gis)

   v.dump_file_usage(v.file_usage())
_endblock 
$

See the public comments for ds_version_view.file_usage() for a description of the data that is returned. Based on that, you can figure out what percentage of total blocks used is attributable to a particular alternative.

This can give you guidance for which alternatives to merge/post/delete, etc.