On Thu, Nov 04, 2021 at 10:26:20AM +0000, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
> We checked compression, and it just isn't worth it. When you
compress
> 100–200 bytes, the output might be a tiny bit smaller, but then the
> compression alg header is added it becomes a wash. And we lose an important
> properties of simplicity and ability to read this in a text dump without
> further processing. It just isn't worth it.
Example:
$ cat /tmp/payload
{"type":"rpm","name":"systemd","version":"249.4-1.fc35","architecture":"x86_64","osCpe":"cpe:/o:fedoraproject:fedora:35"}
$ for c in zstd gzip xz; do $c -k /tmp/payload; done
$ ls -l /tmp/f*
122 /tmp/f
125 /tmp/f.gz
172 /tmp/f.xz
120 /tmp/f.zst
But a binary representation of that could strip it down into ~50%.
Jakub