Re: [gentoo-dev] News item review: SquashDelta syncing support

[Ian Stakenvicius]

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On 15/05/15 03:33 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 2:32 PM, Ian Stakenvicius <axs@g.o>
> wrote:
>>
>> The new item doesn't really cover this much -- that the feature
>> is for supporting storage and synchronization of the gentoo repo
>> on squashfs rather than on a regular filesystem.  Perhaps it
>> would be enough to link to an article describing the benefits of
>> using a squashfs'ed portage tree, so users could chose whether
>> they want this or not based on that?  Similarly, it would
>> probably be good to mention that this new feature deprecates
>> squash_portage and the other tools/methods out there for doing
>> the same thing locally.
>>
>
> That makes sense to me.  Some of the likely benefits would be:
>
> 1.  Less disk space use. 2.  Vastly less inode use. 3.  Much less
> CPU/IO to update. 4.  I suspect much less fragmentation/write/etc
> for storage on flash. Then again, on filesystems like btrfs
> fragmentation might be worse due to all the internal writes. 5.
> Probably better read performance (less disk IO, more CPU).
>
> Downsides include: 1.  No way to sync more frequently than whatever
> the update cycle is. It would be more like emerge-webrsync and less
> like emerge --sync. 2.  Impossible to tweak ebuilds without setting
> up an overlay.  This might be annoying for devs/etc.
>


Given the importance of this is to me more about the squashfs storage
than the sync method, it may even be pertinent to change the title of
the news item to something like:  "SquashFS repo, SquashDelta syncing
support"


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