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by fefe23 2031 days ago
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".
3 comments
mhx77 2031 days ago
> @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.

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bufferoverflow 2031 days ago
The single case in the known universe.
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TimTheTinker 2030 days ago
Very impressive, to say the least.

(Not meant sarcastically :-)

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jasonjayr 2030 days ago
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...

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mhx77 2030 days ago
> 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. :)

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rkeene2 2031 days ago
AppFS provides global file deduplication and also solves the distribution problem, and also you don't need to have all the resources locally
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