Re: Let's talk about compression rates
On 2011-01-22 11:44 +0100, S Mathias wrote:
> $ ls -Sl
> total 461252
> -rw-rw-r--. 1 g g 111709730 Jan 22 11:06 linux-2.6.37.zip
> -rw-rw-r--. 1 g g 93174605 Jan 22 11:03 linux-2.6.37.tar.gz
> -rw-rw-r--. 1 g g 73552510 Jan 22 11:10 linux-2.6.37.tar.bz2
> -rw-rw-r--. 1 g g 66333786 Jan 22 11:16 linux-2.6.37.7z
> -rw-rw-r--. 1 g g 64035788 Jan 22 11:16 linux-2.6.37.tar.7z
> -rw-rw-r--. 1 g g 63480808 Jan 22 11:20 linux-2.6.37.tar.xz
> $
>
> I presume kernel.org knows this. Why doesn't people use e.g.: XZ?
It's rather new and not everybody has it yet, while gzip and bzip2 are
rather ubiquitous. Besides, a lot of scripts will have to be changed if
kernel.org drops .bz2 files and replaces them with .xz files, so this
will probably not be done soon.
> This is the same as in PDF's. DJVU files could be amazing too. They
> could compress [convert] a 400 MByte PDF to a 20 MByte DJVU. Amazing.
>
> Why don't these technologies spread??
They do, albeit slowly. Slackware has already moved to xz compressed
tarballs for their distribution, GNU folks are providing them as well,
Emacs 23.2 transparently deals with xz compressed files, dpkg 1.15.6
supports xz compressed Debian packages etc.
> Any opinions regarding it?
I hope that Debian FTP masters will accept xz-compressed .debs soon and
that they will become standard at some time, so that more packages can
fit on the CDs and download time on upgrades decreases.
Sven
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