Re: Status of deb(5) format support in Debian
On Thu, Aug 01, 2013 at 03:52:38PM +0100, Dmitrijs Ledkovs wrote:
> 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.
Hmm... indeed, some udebs have monstrous control tarballs, the biggest one
being 1167360 bytes long (uncompressed).
> So for that package group it's valuable to have control.tar.xz.
Still, total gains for all udebs (jessie netinst amd64) are only 1.22MB.
Should I try this for regular debs?
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