Re: Q: Is there a compressed filesystem?

[Benedikt Stockebrand <benedikt@devnull.ruhr.de>]

Andreas Brusinsky <brusinsk@ibdr.inf.tu-dresden.de> writes:

> One question comes up when I untar all these huge source distributions:
> 
> Can tar files be accessed directly as a kind of filesystems?
> 
> I mean source files for a user that likes to compile something are just 
> needed for the compile process and are a waste of space after the binaries
> are build. The uncompressed source files consume quite a bit of filesystem 
> space.
> I know the concept of a compressed filesystem from the PC-DOS world but
> believe that this is not a bad thing to have also for unix.
> 
> Is there a compressed filesystem for unix available? 
> So that a compile process just acts inside of a tar file or so. 

You're talking about two different things.  A compressed file system
is entirely different from access to an (uncompressed) tar archive.

Accessing a standard gzip'ed tar archive as a file system is probably
hopeless because it'd have to uncompress the archive from the very
beginning for every file access.  However, IIRC recent GNU tars
support an option to compress files in an archive individually
(probably to limit the loss caused by a damaged archive).

As far as compiling things goes, here's what I do: I've got a series
of Makefiles that first checkout things from a CVS repository, then
build things, install them and remove everything again.  This saves
space (except that the CVS repository isn't gzip'ed) but needs lots of
time because things are always rebuilt from scratch.  As a consequence
I need about 16 hours to rebuild my system (OpenBSD, X11, emacs and
various smaller things) on a P75, even though it's still far from the
point to go online.


    Benedikt

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