[arch-general] About Arch pkg compress format

[Nagy Gabor]

Idézés Jan de Groot <jan at jgc.homeip.net>:

> 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.
> 

I also like LZMA. It's time to create a GPL licensed fork of libarchive;-)
(btw, I hate these license wars.)

Bye



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