On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 05:04:16PM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote: > Hey folks, > > Remembering the fun that we had during the Squeeze release with trying > to make single-CD installations work well, it's time to consider what > we're going to *claim* to support in Wheezy. We've had a history of > supporting the following single-CD installations: > > * Gnome desktop from CD#1 > * KDE desktop from "KDE CD#1" > > At this point, I'm skeptical that either of the first two are going to > work acceptably with Wheezy. There is an easy solution: switch binary packages to xz compression. amd64's CD 1 is reduced to 2/3 of its current size (data from June(?) 2010). If you remember, I also did some research for the whole archive: Thread: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2011/08/msg00220.html Raw data: http://angband.pl/deb/xz/debs.txt There is a misconception that only big packages are worth compressing. Ten small packages give almost as good savings as one big. xz is indeed worse than gzip for smallest packages (~1-2KB) but the total savings that could be gained by a smart selection of the compression method are so small that they're not worth any extra complexity. xz has decompression speed hardly slower than gzip (as opposed to bzip2). It has vastly slower compression, though: testing on three packages, on amd64 it slows package builds by ~5%, on armel by ~2% (it was a _really_ unexhaustive test, though). And if this is a blocker, you can repack binaries afterwards, possibly on one of idle cores on that big amd64 machine standing near your armel/m68k buildd. Unlike last August when we had that discussion, neither debootstrap nor d-i have any problems with xz anymore. Thus, let's just switch dpkg-deb's default to xz. Lowering bandwidth usage is worth the extra build time cost. -- // If you believe in so-called "intellectual property", please immediately // cease using counterfeit alphabets. Instead, contact the nearest temple // of Amon, whose priests will provide you with scribal services for all // your writing needs, for Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory prices.
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