On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 12:39 PM, Jan de Groot <jan@jgc.homeip.net> wrote:
On Wed, 2008-05-21 at 18:47 +0300, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote:
Hi,
On Tue, 2008-05-20 at 10:14 +0200, Jan de Groot wrote:
Pacman itself is ready for .tar.bz2 package files. The whole issue with .bz2 files is that compression and decompression times increase a lot without giving the same amount of size reduction back. We've done some recent tests with LZMA, which compresses just as good as bzip2 at the lowest compression rate, but does it at the same speed as gzip.
About LZMA I should add that when using higher (actually the default) compression rate, compression is much better than bzip2 but takes more time/memory. Decompression however, which is what really matters in a packaging format, is kept fast and lightweight.
What's the memory usage when unzipping an LZMA file? Is it much higher than the needs of gzip? We already have problems supporting low-memory systems with our installer, adding a compression algorithm that eats more memory will cause even more problems for these systems.
That's actually not entirely true. Dan and I investigated this. The previous low memory issues were caused by the entire install system never leaving the initramfs, and remaining entirely in RAM - which soaked far more than pacman ever will. Additionally, with the dynamic package patch (dunno if this is in the master branch yet), memory usage sank by leaps and bounds.