Re: zstd compression

[Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>]

Hello Maxim,

thanks for explaining.  I see, "Guix System" is also an operating system,
which is not immediately obvious from the web page (but only becomes
clear after following the "about" link).  I now also understand that
some steps have been taken to mitigate some of the security implications
of the fundamental concept.  It all sound extremely complicated, which
is usually not very good for security - then again, this is probably
the usual tradeoff that every system has to make: OpenBSD leans towards
security and simplicity, Guix appears to lean more towards fancy
features at the expense of significant complication.

Anyway, i have now added Guix here:

  http://mandoc.bsd.lv/ports.html  # three place: overview, packages,
                                     maintenance
  http://mandoc.bsd.lv/porthistory.html  # two entries


Maxim Cournoyer wrote on Wed, Jan 29, 2025 at 03:30:52PM +0900:
> Ingo Schwarze wrote:

>> I feel serious tempted to rip out compression support altogether.
>> It's just so anachronistic.

> It costs relatively little in complexity,

As long as only one compression format is required, the complexity is
moderate, and that contributed to not being ripped out yet.  It gets
worse when different systems require different compression.

Let's wait for Soeren - if he manages to get the compat lib installed
as a shared object, then i can do the zstd thing in the upstream repo
as explained earlier, with the (small) additional complexity confined
to the configuration system, without invading the code.

[...]
> That's a 50 MiB space saving, which while not enormous is not nothing
> either, especially on a transactional system like Guix where you may be
> keeping multiple past versions of things with the space usage adding up.

OK, let's assume the worst: every user installs all the packages
you have on your system, but in such a way that no two users
install the same version of any package.  Then it boils down to
50 MiB per user, which i would indeed call "nothing".  I mean,
a few lines above, you talked about making it easy fur users to
compile chromium.  Compared to that, 50 MiB is absolutely nothing
indeed.  I think you can safely assume every user does at least
*something* that requires space in amounts typical for the 2020ies,
and compared to that, 50 MiB is nothing.

Or look at it the other way: how many users do you have on your
machine?  Two hundred, maybe?  In that case, you gain 10 GB.
On which modern machine that serves hundreds of users do 10 GB
of disk space matter?

Yours,
  Ingo
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