Re: bzip vs gzip
Hi,
On Sun, 28 Mar 1999, Shane King wrote:
> I think until most people have a T1 into their living room and terabyte
> hard drives that anything that cuts down file size is most likely worth
> the performance tradeoff.
Even though the size argument is a very attractive one, we must not forget
that bzip2 still is not very much of a standard tool. It can currently
not touch the installed base of gzip.
One of the .deb format's strong points is the fact that it is a gzipped
ar archive of two tar archives. The gzip, ar and tar tools are available
on almost any platform, making the .deb format very "nice" in this aspect.
I am all for Debian supporting and driving new innovations, particularly
regarding useful standards. But this doesn't mean that we can lightly
dismiss existing standards and disregard their usefulness as a standard
per se.
A similar argument can be made about pentium-optimized .debs: although
almost most computers are now pentium or better (can one even buy less
than a pentiumII in the shops nowadays?) we still continue to compile for
386, allowing Debian to run out of the box on 386en and 486en. IMHO this
is a Good Thing.
Cheers,
Joost
- using Debian on a 386sx20 as a dial-in router at home.
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