On Feb 7, 2008 11:24 PM, Travis Willard <travis@archlinux.org> wrote:

Just doing an update, and I noticed this:

Targets: coreutils-6.10-1 bash-3.2.033-2 cairo-1.4.14-1 gtk2-2.12.7-1 gcc-libs-4.2.3-3 mpfr-2.3.1-1 gcc-4.2.3-1 mesa-7.0.3rc1-1 acroread-8.1.2-1 automake-1.10.1-2 kernel26-2.6.24-2 catalyst-8.01-3 curl-7.18.0-1 devtools-0.5-1 dhcpcd-3.2.1-1 e2fsprogs-1.40.5-1 faac-1.26-1 filesystem-2007.11-6 fakeroot-1.9.2-1 findutils-4.2.32-1 flex-2.5.33-4 librsvg-2.20.0-1 libxmu-1.0.4-1 gimp-2.4.4-1 git-1.5.4-1 gpgme-1.1.6-1 groff-1.19.2-4 kde-common-3.5.8-3 lm_sensors-3.0.1-1 kdebase-3.5.8-3 lftp-3.6.3-1 libgnomecups-0.2.3-1 libxml2-2.6.31-1 libgnomeprint-2.18.3-1 libgnomeprintui-2.18.2-1 libidl2-0.8.10-1 libmysqlclient-5.0.51-2 libtasn1-1.3-1 libtool-1.5.26-1 lua-5.1.3-1 lvm2-2.02.33-1 man-1.6f-2 man-pages-2.77-1 mysql-clients-5.0.51-3 nasm-2.01-1 orbit2-2.14.12-1 pcre-7.6-2 php-5.2.5-3 pil-1.1.6-4 postgresql-libs-8.3.0-1 sdl_mixer-1.2.8-2 shared-mime-info-0.23-1 snownews-1.5.8-1 spamassassin-3.2.4-2 sqlite3-3.5.5-1 sudo-1.6.9p12-1 tk-8.5.0-2 wget-1.11-1 which-2.19-2 xfsprogs-2.9.5-1 xine-lib-1.1.10-1 xorg-server-1.4.0.90-6

Total Download Size: 194.03 MB Total Installed Size: 194.39 MB

Does gzip compression really give us so little as to only save 0.3 MB over uncompressed for so many packages? I figured the difference would be a bit more - does it suck for compressing binary data? Should we consider moving to a different, more compressed archive format? Or am I just making a mountain out of a molehill here?

No, its a bunch of bullshit. If/when the repo db scripts get rewritten, we would actually have installed sizes available in our PRIMARY repos. Currently the only repo that has them is community, so what you see above is that the installed size of your community packages just happens to be slightly greater than the download size of all of the packages, so installed size is shown. It is a terrible heuristic, see this commit queued for 3.2 for details: http://projects.archlinux.org/git/?p=pacman.git;a=commitdiff;h=93a3050ed9e97... Thus, anything in core or extra will lie to you. -Dan