Re: [gentoo-dev] New global USE flag: gzip-dict

[Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@googlemail.com>]

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On Fri, 19 Dec 2008 19:56:02 +0300
Peter Volkov <pva@gentoo.org> wrote:
> В Птн, 19/12/2008 в 14:45 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh пишет:
> > If it reads (and presumably uncompresses) all of them at startup
> > anyway, what's the point in compressing them at all?
> 
> It makes size smaller: both index and data files are text files so
> compression is very effective. All distributions I've checked compress
> data files, some compress both data and index. Probably all desktop
> users want dictionaries to be compressed because modern cpu's are
> really fast in decompression and even on my 4-years old notebook it
> takes less then second... But still there are environments where it's
> better to keep dictionaries uncompressed. That's why I want to keep
> this feature optional.

But disk space is cheap. How big are the dictionaries? The vim
dictionaries are around half a meg uncompressed, and if you're looking
to save a meg or two in disk space on the kind of system that includes
dictionaries then you're doing something seriously wrong...

Really, all that compression seems to do is save a small amount of
irrelevant disk space, at the cost of requiring more disk space and
memory for a new library and slowing things down to a level that's
unacceptable on some systems. Compression makes sense for network
transfers, backups and file formats that do their own domain specific
compression. Elsewhere? Likely not so much.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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