[gentoo-dev] Having fun with compression

[Patrick Lauer <patrick@gentoo.org>]

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Hi all,

I had this random idea that many of our distfiles are .tar.gz while more
efficient compression methods exist. So I did some testing for fun:

We have ~15k .tar.gz in distfiles. ~6500 .tar.bz2, ~2000 others.
A short run over 477 distfiles spanning 833M gave me 586M of .tar.bz2 -
roughly 30% more efficient!
A comparison run with 7zip gave me 590M files, so bzip2 seems to be
quite good.

I don't think repackaging every .tar.gz as .tar.bz2 is a reasonable
option (breaks MD5 digests, we lose the fallback download from the
homepage), but maybe this motivates people to save bandwidth and migrate
their packaging to bzip2.

Happy hacking,

Patrick

-- 
Stand still, and let the rest of the universe move

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