Re: Compress VCS checkouts?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

Eric Bavier <address@hidden> skribis:

> A while back I toyed with the idea of a "Sources DVD" for Guix, much
> like Trisquel has. While looking into the feasability of this, I
> noticed that the git/svn/cvs/hg checkouts our packages use are not
> compressed in the store.  So I wrote a simple script to compare the raw
> size of all source checkouts with their corresponding xz-compressed
> tarballs.  
>
> At the time, I couldn't convince myself the trouble was worth the
> effort; we had only 385MiB of uncompressed source checkouts, which
> would compress to 135MiB.
>
> Since that initial investigation, the number of packages using VCS
> checkouts has risen from 50 to 389, and the on-disk size of that source
> has risen to 3784MiB uncompressed.  We could compress that down to
> 538MiB.
>
> Compression in not free, but I think it would be nice for our build
> servers who have to store and serve (which, iirc, requires them to
> compress it anyhow) this source.

‘guix publish -C’ always compresses store items, unless they are regular
files ending in “.gz”, “.xz”, etc.  So there’s no problem here.

It seems to me that the only benefit of compressing checkouts would be
the use case you’re talking about.  For everyday use, it’s actually more
efficient to leave the uncompressed, so that people don’t end up doing
round of compression/decompression when they run “guix build”.

WDYT?

That said, at worst, this could be addressed by writing a specific tool
for the job.

Ludo’.