Re: .deb format: let's use 0.939, zstd, drop bzip2

[Ansgar <ansgar@debian.org>]

Hi Adam,

On Fri, 2019-05-10 at 16:11 +0200, Adam Borowski wrote:
> /usr on the box I'm sitting at:
> * zip the program: dies horribly due to /usr/lib/llvm-7/build/
> symlink
>   loops.
> * zip:
> 	1891345142 bytes
> * zip-the-concept (individually compressed files), xz
> 	1516943024 bytes
> * tar.xz
> 	1092591508 bytes
> 
> Linux source:
> * zip:
> 	213820843 bytes
> * individually compressed files, xz
> 	180997203 bytes
> * tar.xz:
> 	104318396 bytes
> 
> So no, I don't want zip, nor even a randomly accessible format.

Could you also try 7z?  It supports solid compression[1] which
compresses multiple files into one block like tar.xz, but unlike tar.xz
can use more than one block: "Later versions of 7-zip use a variable
solid block size, so that only a limited amount of data must be
processed in order to extract one file".

So it would provide somewhat random access and still offer better
compression than zip or other forms of individually compressed files.

It would be interesting if you could also include the access time for
extracting only the last member of the archive; though for 7z one would
need to check if it does the right thing first...

Ansgar

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_compression