You're missing the point. No normal user program can ever do what a filesystem can do: deduplicate in a way that is hidden for the user of the filesystem. Unless you want to change everything into a black box managed by the package manager, making everything confusing for users and also maintainers.

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Timon3 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Why would the deduplication need to be hidden from the user? Why would everything need to become a blackbox?

Hardlinks have long been a well-documented feature of many file systems. I don't see how their use in a context users largely do not meddle with is too confusing or complicated.

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amelius 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Because why would you make everything more complicated if the file system can handle it just fine, plus you can automatically deduplicate other files that have nothing to do with package management?

	▲	Timon3 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Because (going by scheme271's numbers) I might not want to waste lots of expensive RAM on something or mess around with offline deduplication, when a less resource-intensive alternative is entirely sufficient for whatever my use case is. Maybe it's because I've been recently playing around with deduplicating subtrees in a different domain, but I don't see what makes this feature too complex to be worth the cost. Sure, symlinks and hardlinks require some additional care compared to plain files, but it's easy enough to add tests for those cases.
	▲	ecnahc515 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Well uv runs on many systems and most don't have filesystem level dedupe configured, unfortunately. Anyways it can be both? It could let the filesystem handle it if it detected the FS has file or block dedupe and fallback to hardlinks otherwise. It doesn't but that could be done if it showed it was worth it.