Keep portage from compressing things on install?

[ahferroin7]

A bit of background first: I'm using BTRFS on all my systems, and just switched things to start using the new zstandard transparent file compression support that got added a couple of kernel releases ago. The settings used in-kernel actually give both better compression and better speed than either zlib/gzip or bzip2 with the default options there (no, seriously, I got rid of the gzip compression I've been using for everything in /var/log on my system and it freed up a couple of gigabytes of space). Given this, I would much rather have the transparent compression done by BTRFS do it's job and not manually compress stuff from userspace unless I need it really tiny (in which case I'll probably still use zstandard from userspace, just with significantly more aggressive settings than the kernel uses). TO that end, I've turned off compression in logrotate, ccache, and pretty much everything else on the system that has a switch for this, except for Portage, which brings me to my question.

Is there any way to keep portage from compressing things it would normally compress on installation (such as man pages, texinfo files, stuff in /usr/share/doc, etc) without modifying anything in portage other than configuration. Pretty much, I want to turn the ecmpressdir helper and similar things into a no-op. I know I can obviously just write up a dummy script for PORTAGE_COMPRESS and PORTAGE_BZIP2_COMMAND, but I'm curious if there's some other more elegant way to do it that doesn't require a hacky script to be used.

[khayyam]

ahferroin7 ...

you may be able to set PORTAGE_COMPRESS="true" and PORTAGE_COMPRESS_FLAGS="" to get a no-op, untested.

HTH & best ... khay

[ahferroin7]