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Re: get debian smaller



On Sat, 11 Jan 2003 20:54, Christian Fasshauer wrote:
> You are currently using the tar archiver and gzip with the maximal
> compression rate for creating the deb files. That's more efficient than
> most of the packaging systems I've ever seen but I think there could be
> done more to build the archives smaller. Tar puts a lot of unused

Could you please do some comparisons of:
regular .deb
.deb compressed with bzip2
Each of the above with your new tar replacement.

Your message didn't make clear how much of the benefit is from bzip2 
compression and how much is from your new archive format.  Also please name 
the packages that you use for testing so the tests can be repeated.

Another thing that would be good is a program to convert between tar and dar 
formats.  Then we could run it across an entire Debian archive and see how 
much we would save.

With a few quick tests the best benefit I could find from bzip2 was libc6-dev 
which only got 15% smaller.

On many occasions I've used ar, tar, and gzip to extract a Debian package.  If 
this is included in dpkg then we also need a separate dar utility, and 
support in busybox would be reallyhandy too...

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