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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 r

by fefe23 6y 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".

rkeene2 6y ago
AppFS provides global file deduplication and also solves the distribution problem, and also you don't need to have all the resources locally
mhx77 6y 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.
- bufferoverflow 6y ago
  The single case in the known universe.
- TimTheTinker 6y ago
  Very impressive, to say the least. (Not meant sarcastically :-)
jasonjayr 6y 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-FileHandle+0.010 http://matrix.cpantesters.org/?dist=Log-Any-Adapter-FileHand...
- mhx77 6y 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. :)

by fefe23 6y ago

rkeene2 6y ago

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

mhx77 6y 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.

bufferoverflow 6y ago
The single case in the known universe.
TimTheTinker 6y ago
Very impressive, to say the least. (Not meant sarcastically :-)

jasonjayr 6y 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-FileHandle+0.010 http://matrix.cpantesters.org/?dist=Log-Any-Adapter-FileHand...

mhx77 6y 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. :)