Thanks..mikeb wrote:1. and 2. Never noticed any.... have average 20-30 sfs loaded on pentium 3 machines and runs as expected. The union seems to have no penalty...if there is its more to do with decompressing the contents of the sfs.. If the sfs are loaded to ram as I do then that more than compensates for any slowdown.
3. thats depends on how they are built. If they are built for a particular system then duplication would be avoided same as a pet/deb and so on. If there is the odd duplicated library its of no consequence.
4. Thats more to do with construction.. An app can have its own library versions if system variables are used to point to them. So not an sfs feature as such. The files are layered transparently into one filesystem...which is the idea.
5. The cleaness depends on if you have a save system like a save file. But definately clean in so far as removal is always 100%...good for testing and updating. I happen to use a sfs for saves on puppy.
6. Not sure really.... not useable in a full install but as it turns out even that is possible. sfs versions are not backward compatible..ie one made for system x will not load for an older one even though the software inside might actually work.
Slax might be an interesting one to look at... the full system layering approach you will see in there ...
Hope that clarifies
mike
I really like this method..