Hi folks,

Facebook just published an interesting bit of tech that uses squashfs to create single-file executables that don't require a pre-installed container engine to execute, but do place some more significant demands on the FUSE subsystem, and also require a bootstrapping executable to set up the filesystem mounts.

I recommend taking a look at their blog post, as xar seems like quite an interesting capability to consider offering: whereas containers and flatpaks give you both build time and runtime component isolation, xar files aim to behave more like a statically linked ELF binary with no supporting data files (no runtime isolation, but no direct dependencies on the host filesystem either).

Cheers, Nick.

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Cooper Ry Lees me@cooperlees.com Date: 14 July 2018 at 06:51 Subject: [Distutils]Introducing XAR - SquashFS based mountable executables - Calling OS/Distro Maintainers To: distutils-sig@python.org

Hi distutils,

Today Facebook Open Sourced a competitor to PEX and other zip based distribution methods for Python (and potentially other languages). Basically it's claim to fame is start up time for large modules being similar to regular on file system modules due to extracting on read via SquashFS mounted executables. For more information read our blog post: - https://code.fb.com/data-infrastructure/xars-a-more-efficient-open-source-sy...

The bdist_xar 'wheel' like plugin is also now in PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/xar/ (https://github.com/facebookincubator/xar/).

Main reason I wanted to post here was I'd love to reach out to our OS maintainers on list (e.g. Mr Stinner) and talk about getting the components of XAR into the OS's package repos. The main components that make sense are: - xarexec_fuse: https://github.com/facebookincubator/xar/ - squashfuse: a newer version with squashfuse_ll (and optionally zstd support) https://github.com/vasi/squashfuse - squashfs-tools: a newer version with zstd support (made optional I guess)

Once we had this, it would make building XARs as easy as building wheels, even more so when we can define OS level dependencies for it!

Please feel free to reach out to me directly with any questions etc. - Also want to note, Sumanah suggested I floated this here, I apologize if this is a misuse of the list. If so, please ignore. I was torn wether or not this is appropriate.

Thanks, Cooper

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