Re: Tiny Guix (and containers)

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> skribis:

>>   34M     nnykzgwfy8mwh2gmxm715sjxykg8qjwn-binutils-2.28
>
> “share/locale” is 9.4M.  This is a cross-cutting concern.  We don’t have
> a way to globally filter locales to only requested locales.  Even if we
> split them each into a separate output — how would you specify that you
> want the “de_DE” locale in each package and not install the rest?

There’s also the problem that packages typically hardcode $localedir in
binaries, which means we would need a special mechanism to decouple
locale data from packages.

> There seems to be some duplication with these directories:
>
>     /gnu/store/nnykzgwfy8mwh2gmxm715sjxykg8qjwn-binutils-2.28/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/bin/
>     /gnu/store/nnykzgwfy8mwh2gmxm715sjxykg8qjwn-binutils-2.28/bin/
>
> But the binaries seem to be hardlinked, so they don’t take up extra
> space.

But they do take up extra space when transmitted over the wire as nars,
and in Docker/tarball packs.

In general we should replace hard links with symlinks because of that
(Mesa has the same problem.)

>> Now it takes forever to set up the image
>
> Have you tried disabling compression?  This could be a lot faster.  I
> found that tar with gzip compression is terribly slow to copy things
> from the store into a compressed tar archive.  Disabling compression
> speeds this up considerably, even though it is still rather slow.

In general one wants compression though, no?  I’d be curious to see how
we can make it faster!

Ludo’.