Re: Debian too big? (Re: intent to package: gmt generic mapping tools)

[Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au>]

>> 1) This would suck for people on 486s and 386 and those who are low on RAM
>bzip2 is a pig.
>
>hey bzip2 work fine for me on my 68040/25MHz, at least for unpacking, packing could be a bit slower but that is only for package maintainer and i guess we people use 386 for packaging lets say X or glibc :)

One issue of bzip2 is it's memory requirements.  On a machine with small RAM
it'll thrash.  Here's an excerpt from the man page:
             Compression:   400k + ( 7 x block size )

             Decompression: 100k + ( 4 x block size ), or
                            100k + ( 2.5 x block size )

Here's a table of block size, compressed output size, and memory
requirements.  Compressing with -3 may work well, but we almost certainly
don't want -9 in the current Debian setup.

                  Compress   Decompress   Decompress   Corpus
           Flag     usage      usage       -s usage     Size

            -1      1100k       500k         350k      914704
            -2      1800k       900k         600k      877703
            -3      2500k      1300k         850k      860338
            -4      3200k      1700k        1100k      846899
            -5      3900k      2100k        1350k      845160
            -6      4600k      2500k        1600k      838626
            -7      5400k      2900k        1850k      834096
            -8      6000k      3300k        2100k      828642
            -9      6700k      3700k        2350k      828642
 

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