Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: patch-log sizes

[Miles Bader]

On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 09:41:11AM -0500, Aaron Bentley wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-12-16 at 19:04, Miles Bader wrote:
> > Would it be practical to allow some sort of compacted patch-log storage
> > for sets of old patch-logs, e.g., a .tar.gz file, managed via explicit
> > user commands?
> 
> For your purposes, it might be an advantage to *not* compress the tar
> files.  Your primary reason for using tars is to represent several small
> files as one larger file, which an uncompressed tar can do.

No, the compression is quite important too.  On ASCII text gzip can reduce
the size of files dramatically (especially on regular text with lots of
keywords like patch-logs), and as asuffield has pointed out, the size of the
patch-log text itself is a problem, not merely the file-system overhead.

> It seems like you might want to add new files to the tar file, and it's
> easy to append new files into an uncompressed tar (tar -rvf foo.tar
> bar).  But it's not possible to do this with a compressed tar-- you must
> uncompress it first.

This is not an issue.  As I envision it, the operation of adding new
patch-logs to a `old bundle' will be _extremely_ infrequent (maybe something
you do once every six months), so it's perfectly fine to just unpack the old
bundle, and repack a new one containing the new files.

-Miles
-- 
We are all lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
-Oscar Wilde