meta-repository idea (was Re: mplayer vs. xine)

[Jeremy Katz]

On Tue, 2004-02-03 at 18:54 +0200, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-02-03 at 17:41, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > On Tue, 2004-02-03 at 10:10 +0200, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> > > - Any particular reason for using gzip instead of bzip2? The difference 
> > > can be huge, especially for other.xml:
> > 
> > The difference in memory usage can be huge too -- bzip's memory
> > footprint is far larger than gzip's and not really worth the compression
> > savings in the vast majority of cases.
> 
> Sure bzip2 uses more memory but a box which can comfortably run FC 1 or
> 2 can afford whatever memory bzip2 uses. Heck my firewall box with 32MB
> memory has no problems running apt and using bzip2 as package index
> compression. In embedded space, and ok from installer point of view
> (since it's you who mentions the memory usage :) things can be
> different.

Right, but we want one metadata format to rule them all which means that
you want to care about this case.  And even if it can be comfortably
run, that doesn't mean that you want all of the extra overhead.  If it
were the case, then we'd all be going with bzip2 payloads in rpm now :-)

Jeremy