Possible NEW package format

Kocil · 08-30-2004, 01:44 AM

I made a simple experiments,
converted all tgz-s under /slackware/xap and /slackware/d from slack 10 to tbz2-s

Here is the total size
tgz = 206860 KBytes
tbz2 = 182104 KBytes.

So yeah. I guess only 10% difference. Not significant enough.

vdogvictor · 08-30-2004, 10:17 AM

Well if it is a 10% difference and you could do it all on your own that easily I think its worth it. Downloading precompiled programs is also an aspect, not only the ISOs

cb951303 · 08-30-2004, 11:04 AM

the compression ratio depands on data to compress
but yes bzip2's compression ratio is better then tgz

irfanhab · 09-11-2004, 12:54 AM

with tbz2 the saving potential is enornmous
check this site out
http://static.bwerp.net/~adam/slackw...es-static.html

Lord Zoltar · 09-11-2004, 05:43 PM

why not support both?

Code:

if $file_extention == tbz2
   use bunzip2
elseif $file_extention== tgz
   use gunzip
.../*for other comrpession formats*/

seriously, would it be difficult to support both tgz and tbz2 ?
and possibly others?

gbonvehi · 09-11-2004, 05:49 PM

Well, my 2 cents, bzip2 is good in compression ratio, but i guess you never tried to decompress something on a old machine compressed with it, it takes forever...
As you pointed out, compression difference isn't too much, but i recall, gzip uses less cpu (a lot) than bzip2.

Oh, and Slackware is designed to support old machine, so don't forget about us!

BrianW · 09-11-2004, 06:30 PM

I think adding in a dependency option would be more beneficial than saving 10% bandwidth...