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Re: distribute xz-compressed tarballs, too?
From: |
Bruno Haible |
Subject: |
Re: distribute xz-compressed tarballs, too? |
Date: |
Fri, 4 Jun 2010 17:38:57 +0200 |
User-agent: |
KMail/1.9.9 |
Hi Jim,
> Have you considered distributing xz-compressed tarballs for gettext?
> They would be about half the size of the gzip-compressed ones:
True, but it would need 50% more disk space on the ftp server and each
of its mirrors.
Then, it requires educating the users about what kind of file this is
and with which tools they should unpack it:
- The 'file' command from not too long ago does not know about this format:
$ file gettext-0.18.1.*
gettext-0.18.1.tar.gz: gzip compressed data, from Unix, last modified: Fri
Jun 4 15:02:42 2010, max compression
gettext-0.18.1.tar.xz: data
- The 'tar' program knows about this format only since version 1.22.
The benefit would be marginal:
- You get 500 GB disks for about $ 100 or less nowadays.
- Most users have a bandwidth of 100 KB/sec or more. It does not really
matter whether a file arrives in 150 sec or 75 sec.
- Disk and network hardware is now frequently used for movies, which
has file sizes starting at 10 MB and going up to 5 GB.
- Distributors are free to repack the tarballs (in fact, Mandriva used
.bz2 for everything some time ago).
Bruno
Re: distribute xz-compressed tarballs, too?, Bruno Haible, 2010/06/06