Somewhat related (and definitely born out of a very similar use case): https://github.com/mhx/dwarfs https://github.com/mhx/dwarfs I initially built this for h

Somewhat related (and definitely born out of a very similar use case): https://github.com/mhx/dwarfs https://github.com/mhx/dwarfs I initially built this for having access to 1000+ Perl installations (spanning decades of Perl releases). The compression in this case is not quite as impressive (50 GiB to around 300 MiB), but access times are typically in the millisecond region.