Re: Status of deb(5) format support in Debian
On 1 August 2013 15:40, Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 06:24:32PM +0200, Guillem Jover wrote:
>> [...] in preparation to add non-gzip compression support for control.tar
>
> May I ask why would you want that?
>
> There's a lot of extra complexity, incompatibility with existing tools,
> added moving parts... and I'm not aware of any gain.
>
> xz, while vastly superior to gzip and bzip2 for bulk data, suffers from
> slow start: for files a few tens of kilobytes or smaller, xz compresses
> worse than gzip. Thus, control.tar.xz is hardly ever a good idea.
>
> On the other hand, control files compress pretty well, so you want _some_
> form of compression. For files this small, CPU costs are totally
> negligible.
>
> Thus, with .tar.gz being either the best or very close to the best,
> what would be the point of this change?
>
For debian-installer (et. al. components) at the moment control.tar.gz
is often larger than data.tar.xz since "templates" are very long and
include a lot of translations.
So for that package group it's valuable to have control.tar.xz.
Regards,
Dmitrijs.
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