Re: Debian Mirror with lzma compressed packages
> Does LZMA have any drawbacks? According to Wikipedia[1,2] indicates that
> it is slower than gzip, at perhaps around half the speed, but that it
> may require a lot of memory to compress, but reasonably little to
According to my check last year and a few weeks or months:
lzma decompresses faster than bzip2. yes it's slower to compress, but which user
will have to?
> Gürkan, do you have numbers on compression speed and memory usage for
> the Debian archive?
please see the above link.
> I'm not sure if the smaller size that LZMA allows is worth it if it then
> takes a lot longer to unpack files, or if it becomes impossible to do so
> due to memory requirements.
i don't know on memory requirements. but i didn't notice any speed drawbacks
for my personal use.
> However, it should be possible to use
> different compressors on different architectures: if LZMA turns out to
> be too slow for arm, for example, we could stick with gzip on arm and
> other slow/small architectures, and use LZMA on the fast/big ones.
have you done some testing or is this just a guess?
> It is far less deployed as bzip2, so manually unpacking .deb packages on
> some random GNU/Linux or Unix rescue system is more likely to fail.
very seldom i had the need to manually unpack .deb packages. and
lzma can easily be installed, jus tlike bzip2 (which is not found by default
on any to me known system).
> Bzip2 is pretty ubiquitous these days, so comparing lzma numbers to
> bzip2 might make sense as well.
see the url above.