RPM roadmapping

[Callum Lerwick]

On Wed, 2007-08-01 at 16:26 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> bz2 makes things somewhat smaller, with a significant increase in
> cpu time and memory usage; unknown how much that is worth it. rpm
> already gzips the payload.

bz2 is orders of magnitude slower than gzip. It tends to be worth it
with source tarballs, where bz2's compression is especially effective,
the bandwidth savings outweigh the slowness and you're usually not
dealing with gigabytes of data.

Now, installing an entire 4-6-10gb Fedora distro from bz2 will likely
stretch your install time to days on a mediocre machine, and weeks on a
slow one. Not worth it.

Other options are LZMA (http://tukaani.org/lzma/) which claims to be
compress better than bzip2, without being as slow. At least at
decompression.

LZO (http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/) is specifically designed
for fast decompression speed, but it sounds like it doesn't beat
zip/DEFLATE's compression ratio.

And there's even an improved DEFLATE compressor from 7zip around,
(http://advancemame.sourceforge.net/comp-readme.html) now if someone
could just make it a drop in zlib replacement...


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