>>>>> On Tue, 04 Jun 2024, Florian Schmaus wrote:

> Both is fine with me.

> That said, many filesystem support inline data. If I am not mistaken,
> then its even enabled by default for xfs (which we recommend in the
> handbook) and btrfs. Also some README.gentoo files become suitable for
> inlining after compression (btrfs' limit is 2048 bytes).

I see 48 README.gentoo* files on my system here, and the _uncompressed_
size of the largest of them (belonging to www-client/firefox) is 1238
bytes. So, by your metric all of them could be inlined even without
compressing them. 14 of the 48 files aren't even compressed because
their size is below Portage's size limit (which is 128 bytes IIRC).

Also, it's not surprising that these files are very small. If they were
large, they wouldn't be suitable as output in pkg_postinst.

OTOH, if the filesystem is ext4, README.gentoo and the hash file will
each use up one 4 KiB block and one inode.

> Considering this, the 4-byte hash file is superior under the right
> circumstances when compared to excluding README.gentoo from
> compression. And I could imagine that the circumstances are right for
> many of our users.

I very much doubt this.

In any case, the above size considerations aren't important. My main
point is that the code is getting way too complicated for the simple
task of printing a few lines in pkg_postinst.

Ulrich