Hello Guix!
On the Guix-blog¹, Ludo already mentioned the lightning talk of Michael
Stapelberg on the “distri” package manager which installs packages
faster than common package managers by an order of magnitude.
Common package managers install a package by downloading it as an
(compressed) archive and extracting the archive. But this extraction
takes very long as it requires to create dozens of files on the file
system which is an expensive IO operation.
In contrast, distri downloads the package as an (squashfs) image. That's
it. The image will then be mounted (which is not an expensive IO
operation) as a read-only virtual-file-system. (But as it's not
recommendable to mount as many images as there are installed packages,
distri mounts the package-images lazily, i.e. right before they are
being used.)
(At least, the above explanation reflects my understanding.)
Thus, I wonder: (0) Does it make sense to make Guix follow this idea as
well? I.e. should we make Guix install packages by downloading images
and mounting those instead of extracting archives? (1) Does this even
fit into Guix technically? I.e. how hard would it be to implement this?
(2) And would it even be worth it? I.e. how much faster would Guix
become?
I hope for an exciting discussion!
mekeor
--
Footnotes:
1:
https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2021/getting-bytes-to-disk-more-quickly/
