Re: Bug#160928: ITP: 7zip -- 7zip is file compressor which can handle many archive formats
On Wed, 18 Sep 2002, Drew Scott Daniels wrote:
> Check out the information available at http://www.compression.ca and
> you'll see that rar can be significantly better than zip as it can do
> solid archives. You should also note that there are many other archivers
> that have better compression than rar and many that have similar features.
> Rar has been around and had it's features for a long time and thus it has
> become popular with people who deal with large sets of data on a regular
> basis. Ace for similar reasons has become somewhat popular too. Personally
> I'm a fan of prediction by partial match (ppm) algorithms which are in the
> top archivers. They're resource intensive, but get better compression
> ratios. I mentioned a bit about compression in my post about my "Debian
> (would like) to do list".
>
> As far as using rar for distribution of Debian archives, I think there are
> better alternatives. There are many arguments against switching from gzip,
> now that bzip2 is becoming accepted, I doubt that people will want to
> switch from it (despite the author's claims that bzip2 is suboptimal for
> compression).
debs are 'solid' archives, to use the terminology.
Besides, in dpkg cvs HEAD(what will be version 2.0), is support for gzip,
bzip2, and stored compression formats for debs.
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