Re: slink is gone, goals for potato?

[Ben Pfaff <pfaffben@pilot.msu.edu>]

Stephen Crowley <crow@debian.org> writes:

   Why not for packages? I think the majority of people have faster machines
   rather than slower. How long are we going to keep this up? I mean in 5 years
   from now are we still gonna be worried about the 4 people out there running
   386s? I hope not. No offense, but there is no need for this. A 486 is gonna
   be slow whether its gzipped or bzip2ed, what about us poor modem users? Not
   everyone has T1 to their house you know.

Before you start saying things like that, try considering some facts.
I downloaded the entire slink base section from a local mirror,
extracted the tarballs, then recompressed them with gzip -9v and bzip2
-9v.  The results:

blp:~/debian-cd/bin(0)$ du base.tgz
13897   base.tgz
blp:~/debian-cd/bin(0)$ du base.bz2
13374   base.bz2
blp:~/debian-cd/bin(0)$

i.e., bzip2 is approximately 4% better.  Do you want to slow down
everyone's installs for a 4% improvement in download speed?

Okay, now let's do the same thing with the source archives.  Results
this time:

blp:~/debian-cd/src(0)$ du src.tgz/
27089   src.tgz
blp:~/debian-cd/src(0)$ du src.bz2/
21729   src.bz2
blp:~/debian-cd/src(0)$

for a 25% bzip2 advantage.  So it *might* be worth it for source code,
but definitely not for binaries.