This seems like the perfect use-case for DwarFS : "DwarFS is a read-only file system with a focus on achieving very high compression ratios in particular for very redundant data."
I thought of that too, especially since the use case is almost the same:
> I started working on DwarFS in 2013 and my main use case and major motivation was that I had several hundred different versions of Perl that were taking up something around 30 gigabytes of disk space, and I was unwilling to spend more than 10% of my hard drive keeping them around for when I happened to need them.
yjftsjthsd-h|1 year ago
> I started working on DwarFS in 2013 and my main use case and major motivation was that I had several hundred different versions of Perl that were taking up something around 30 gigabytes of disk space, and I was unwilling to spend more than 10% of my hard drive keeping them around for when I happened to need them.