Re: [gentoo-dev] Update on the 23.0 profiles

[Eddie Chapman <eddie@ehuk.net>]

Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> On Sun, 2024-04-07 at 15:07 +0200, Andreas K. Huettel wrote:
> 
>>> tl;dr can we turn them back off in the profile? In any scenario where
>>>  they are beneficial, there's a better place to put them.
>> 
>> Easily doable with lzma, if there is consensus for it. 
>> 
>> Slightly more complex for zstd since this affects gcc and binutils.
>> Still doable though.
> 
> Thanks:
> 
> * https://bugs.gentoo.org/928932
> * https://bugs.gentoo.org/928933

I know this thread is only for people actually involved in Gentoo 
decision making, but I'll add my 2c anyway.

I'm sure nobody is surprised that I support Michael Orlitzky here 100%.

My personal "dream" is to have a Gentoo in the future where *all* 
compression is optional, only enabled by those who want it, not forced 
on anybody.

In my opinion the importance of compression in general diminishes every 
year that goes by as naturally the trend in storage space has to be that 
it increases. So compression will increasingly become a) an extra 
undesirable security risk (it's quite complex to write and maintain 
which only increases rather than decreases the likelihood of security 
issues) and b) a cpu cycle waster (cpu resources will likely remain more 
precious than storage).

I'd love to eventually see a Gentoo where most upstream source is pulled 
in untouched and uncompressed by default and if people want compression 
they can enable it. So I would hope that as each new profile release 
comes, Gentoo becomes less chained to any particular compression 
libraries than it was before, not more. But I'm aware this is 
unrealistic today from the pov of Gentoo infra. Still, I'm allowed to 
dream right?

P.S. This is not a demand, just 2c, and yes, I do know ultimately the 
ones who role their sleeves up and submit patches will decide these things.

Eddie