Hi, On Tue, 2008-05-20 at 10:14 +0200, Jan de Groot wrote: > Pacman itself is ready for .tar.bz2 package files. The whole issue > with .bz2 files is that compression and decompression times increase a > lot without giving the same amount of size reduction back. We've done > some recent tests with LZMA, which compresses just as good as bzip2 at > the lowest compression rate, but does it at the same speed as gzip. About LZMA I should add that when using higher (actually the default) compression rate, compression is much better than bzip2 but takes more time/memory. Decompression however, which is what really matters in a packaging format, is kept fast and lightweight. > The > downside is that LZMA is not supported by libarchive, and won't be > supported officially either, because libarchive is BSD licensed and LZMA > is GPL licensed. Can't this problem be circumvented by spawning the lzma command line utility, and piping all data to it? I understand that this perhaps negates the purpose of libarchive, but the overhead should be small. Thanks, Dimitris
