On Wed, Feb 02, 2005 at 06:03:24AM -0800, Steve G wrote: > Hi, > > With the discussion about trimming specfile changelogs to save space and improve > downloads...why not go one step further? Mandrake has been using bzip2 for a > while and it works just as well and files are significantly smaller. The > conversion could be done in several steps: > > 1) man pages - less already handles bzipped man pages > 2) info pages - I submited patch in bz #128637 to try to get it working > 3) tar > 4) rpms - I'm sure the patch is in Mandrake's version > > Thoughts? bzip2 is only used for the cpio-packed file-data, the rpm-header is not compressed. For the repo-data the changelog can also be trimmed, only if you need to copy the rpm header unmodified this is actually getting a problem (e.g. if you later-on want to verify the md5sum to be the same as in full rpms you download or similar things). I think staying with gzip is ok as it really is a good middle ground between speed and disk compression ratio. bzip2 "feels" noticable slower. greetings, Florian la Roche
