On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 2:32 PM, Ian Stakenvicius <a...@gentoo.org> 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. -- Rich
