Jeff Johnson wrote:
I think bzip2 is the winner at least from the future point of view.
Nicely done.
Now try to get the -9 changed in rpm.
And it also makes little sense to bzip tarballs that end up in gzipped payloads imho.
Which reminds me of another possible space saving in *.rpm packages:
Package headers are not compressed at all.
There are two issues:
1) legacy compatibility with existing deployed rpmlib. yawn ...
2) insuring that compression is applied to signed blobs, rather thatn signing compressed blobs.
If compressed blobs are signed, then the compression cannot be changed without resigning, which
is often logistically impossible.
One of several fundamental design flaw in rpm's header+payload scheme imho.
Anyways, getting headers compressed (which are typically 10-15% of package size), would
presumably save 5-7.5% or so of package size, probably a bigger saving than anything else
yet proposed.
73 de Jeff
