Re: Debian Mirror with lzma compressed packages
On ma, 2007-01-15 at 09:34 +0100, Gürkan Sengün wrote:
> Since the day that dpkg officially supports lzma compressed packages, Gürkan runs
> a mirror of binary packages (i386, sid, main) which can be used easily. The
> general save of downloading is about 30 %. The scripts how it is done and
> the pool is here: http://gnu.ethz.ch/debian-lzma/
Does LZMA have any drawbacks? According to Wikipedia[1,2] indicates that
it is slower than gzip, at perhaps around half the speed, but that it
may require a lot of memory to compress, but reasonably little to
decompress.
Gürkan, do you have numbers on compression speed and memory usage for
the Debian archive?
I'm not sure if the smaller size that LZMA allows is worth it if it then
takes a lot longer to unpack files, or if it becomes impossible to do so
due to memory requirements. However, it should be possible to use
different compressors on different architectures: if LZMA turns out to
be too slow for arm, for example, we could stick with gzip on arm and
other slow/small architectures, and use LZMA on the fast/big ones.
Since dpkg in etch can already supports LZMA, switching to LZMA on the
appropriate architectures might be a good release goal for lenny. I for
one wouldn't mind reducing the size of my personal Debian mirror.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZMA
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_archivers
--
Fundamental truth #1: Complexity is the enemy.
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