Re: [gentoo-dev] Having fun with compression

[Jon Hood <squinky86@gentoo.org>]

Hey Patrick,
    I agree, tar.bz2 is the way to go when possible, but I have many
friends on old bsd-based systems and some old linux boxes I must
maintain that don't have bzip2 support. Normally if I know a package I
write is going to need to go on an older system, I'll package it in both
formats, but there are times when bz2 is just not an option.
    That having been said, it IS an option in 95%+ of the cases I deal
with, and for being on a cable modem, bzip2 has saved quite a bit of
time (and money) in the past.
-Jon

Patrick Lauer wrote:
> 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
>
>   

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