[snip]
Which begs the question ... why has Red Hat (at least in some cases, historically), veered (admittedly only slightly) from the pristine source principle by uncompressing gzipped tarballs and recompressing them with bzip2 only to stuff them in into an rpm if rpm uses gzip?
I think that compressing tarballs of source tars in srpms is a little different than compressing the payload in binary rpms.
Because for the first you don't actually need the least itsybitsy of speed and using bzip2 safes quite a bit of storage for source tarballs.
For binary rpms otoh it's different as there you want a quick installation, so uncompression speed does matter there, and the difference for the binary payload compress with bzip2 and gzip should be considerably less drastic than with source tarballs.
As a test i've created a cpio archive of the current openoffice package in FC:
[root@hamburg tmp]# ll foo.cpio -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 98993152 Feb 2 17:51 foo.cpio
Now the different runtimes and sizes for gzip:
[root@hamburg tmp]# /usr/bin/time gzip -9 foo.cpio 20.15user 0.31system 0:20.47elapsed 99%CPU [root@hamburg tmp]# ll foo.cpio.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 34026424 Feb 2 17:51 foo.cpio.gz [root@hamburg tmp]# /usr/bin/time gunzip -9 foo.cpio.gz 1.19user 0.37system 0:01.65elapsed 94%CPU
Now the same for bzip2:
[root@hamburg tmp]# /usr/bin/time bzip2 -9 foo.cpio 52.49user 0.45system 0:53.05elapsed 99%CPU [root@hamburg tmp]# ll foo.cpio.bz2 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 30408374 Feb 2 17:51 foo.cpio.bz2 [root@hamburg tmp]# /usr/bin/time bunzip2 foo.cpio.bz2 11.73user 0.69system 0:12.47elapsed 99%CPU
So the speed difference in unpacking is about 1:10, size difference is about 1.12:1 which clearly demonstrates my point. I don't want my installation to take 10 times longer for the sake of 12% space saving in the binary rpms.
My uncompressed $0.02
Read ya, Phil
-- Philipp Knirsch | Tel.: +49-711-96437-470 Development | Fax.: +49-711-96437-111 Red Hat GmbH | Email: Phil Knirsch <phil@xxxxxxxxx> Hauptstaetterstr. 58 | Web: http://www.redhat.de/ D-70178 Stuttgart Motd: You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
