[arch-general] About Arch pkg compress format

[Jan de Groot]

On Tue, 2008-05-20 at 15:55 +0900, Bendany Qian wrote:
> Hi all
> 
> I just have a sugguestion about the pkg format.
> 
> Currently archlinux is using gzip compress method to pack the
> package, I think it is better to use bzip2. since bzip2 format
> can save about 10%-20% disk space than gzip. 
> 
> As I know, FreeBSD has already switch its package format from gzip
> to bzip2 a few year ago.
> 
> The back is bzip2 takes more time to compress/decompress. since we 
> are using morden computer. it is not a big problem. 
> (arch only support i686/x64)
> 
> Regards.
> Qian
> 
> --------------------------------------
> GANBARE! NIPPON! Win your ticket to Olympic Games 2008.
> http://pr.mail.yahoo.co.jp/ganbare-nippon/

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. The
downside is that LZMA is not supported by libarchive, and won't be
supported officially either, because libarchive is BSD licensed and LZMA
is GPL licensed.