Subject: Re: Simple offline text-to-speech incoming !

From: Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2022 19:58:34 +0200

Nicolas Graves wrote:
> 2) Vosk-API relies on models. I was thinking about the opportunity to
> also package these models in guix, since it's only a copy and would
> make it more guixy. BUT the big downside is that some of these models
> are huge (~2G). Is there a way to not provide substitutes in some
> such cases ? Maybe that's a thing we can do for all packages relying
> on a copy-build-system or something like that ?

Some free software games also take similar amount of space because they
have a big data set, and often compression doesn't work on already
compressed data like lossless pictures and so on.

Wesnoth that is not that big takes about 600M:
> $ du -hs /gnu/store/1gn6xij7nngy02pqvld21qmshqspmarg-wesnoth-1.16.1
> 590M	/gnu/store/1gn6xij7nngy02pqvld21qmshqspmarg-wesnoth-1.16.1

If we take 0ad its data take way more space:
> $ du -hs
> /gnu/store/95rhwdnxyxvycjn1yp25qy5v4x255l8r-0ad-data-0.0.25b-alpha
> 3.2G
> /gnu/store/95rhwdnxyxvycjn1yp25qy5v4x255l8r-0ad-data-0.0.25b-alpha

Though for some reasons the substitute compression somehow works on its
data because it takes only 1.15GiB to download:
> $ guix package -i 0ad
> The following package will be installed:
>    0ad 0.0.25b-alpha
> 
[...]
>  0ad-data-0.0.25b-alpha  1.15GiB

Xonotic is in the middle: its data is about 1GiB to download:
> xonotic-data-0.8.5  1.08GiB
And once installed it also takes about 1GiB:
> $ du -hs
> /gnu/store/iw1dg3inm4y6z6ch5y3bfziapnc978j7-xonotic-data-0.8.5
> 1.1G
> /gnu/store/iw1dg3inm4y6z6ch5y3bfziapnc978j7-xonotic-data-0.8.5

In your case since you don't build the data it will probably not be
rebuilt often because the dependencies won't change often.

Though I'd be very interested to know if there is some limits or how
to handle way bigger data as I'm interested in finding how to handle
things like the Wikipedia English file for kiwix which takes 80GiB or
more.

Denis.