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Re:DwarFS: A fast high compression read-only file system by fefe23 on Sunday November 29, 2020 @12:40PM (#25246594)
It looks like the benefit is some kind of block or file deduplication.

@OP: Can you please explain why you keep 50 gigs of perl around? :-)

I use compressed read-only file systems all the time to save space on my travel laptop. I have one squashfs for firefox, one for the TeX base install, one for LLVM, one for qemu, one for my cross compiler collection. I suspect the gains over squashfs will be far less pronounced than for the pathological "400 perl version".

Re:DwarFS: A fast high compression read-only file system by mhx77 on Sunday November 29, 2020 @03:33PM (#25247833)
> @OP: Can you please explain why you keep 50 gigs of perl around? :-)

Sure. I've been the maintainer of a perl portability module (Devel::PPPort) for a long time and every release was tested against basically every possible version (and several build flag permutations) of perl that was potentially out in the wild.

Re:DwarFS: A fast high compression read-only file system by bufferoverflow on Sunday November 29, 2020 @07:09PM (#25249379)
The single case in the known universe.
Re:DwarFS: A fast high compression read-only file system by TimTheTinker on Monday November 30, 2020 @01:23AM (#25251206)
Very impressive, to say the least.

(Not meant sarcastically :-)

Re:DwarFS: A fast high compression read-only file system by jasonjayr on Sunday November 29, 2020 @10:37PM (#25250495)
Speculating here, but perl has a very rich test library and harnesses for running tests across multiple perls and platforms.

If you upload a module to CPAN, you automatically get it tested against a huge matrix of configurations:

http://matrix.cpantesters.org/?dist=Log-Any-Adapter-FileHand...

Re:DwarFS: A fast high compression read-only file system by mhx77 on Monday November 30, 2020 @11:59AM (#25255929)
> If you upload a module to CPAN, you automatically get it tested against a huge matrix of configurations.

Very true, and it's definitely a great service!

However, the set of versions/configurations is still limited, and it can take an awful lot of time for the matrix to fill up. I've fixed a bug specific to perl-5.10.0 about a week ago and so far the module hasn't been picked up by that version again.

So while this is definitely good as a service for the general public, it doesn't get you very far if you're trying to build a thing that's supposed to ensure compatibility for other Perl modules across 20 years of Perl history. :)

Re:DwarFS: A fast high compression read-only file system by rkeene2 on Sunday November 29, 2020 @02:45PM (#25247487)
AppFS provides global file deduplication and also solves the distribution problem, and also you don't need to have all the resources locally