At 12:16 PM +0100 2000/1/24, Oliver Fromme wrote:
> Using bzip2 for the FreeBSD distribution sets would increase
> the minimum memory requirement by 4 Mbyte (or about 2.5 Mbyte
> using the -s option of bunzip2, but which doubles decompression
> time).
I really don't see what everyone is getting all worked up about.
Okay, we believe that bzip2 is probably going to be somewhat
better at compressing the ports tarballs (and presumably other
tarballs), but it takes longer to run (both to compress and
uncompress?), and presumably requires both more memory and more CPU.
But gzip is the established standard, and of all the vendors I
know of, only Sun is stupid enough to ship an OS that doesn't have
gzip installed on their base system. It's certainly the most
backwards compatible, and likely to be the best solution for an
install floppy or for running on an older machine.
Can't we do both? Use gzip on the install floppy, but include
bzip2 in /usr/src, and make sure that all the various programs that
deal with tarballs and gzip'ed tarballs can also deal with bzip2
tarballs (including in the ports system)?
I mean, if it's in /usr/src, and we have both gzip & bzip2
installed on the system, it's up to the user to choose which they
prefer and use most of the time, right?
And the only cost is the slight expansion of the amount of disk
space required to store the source code in /usr/src and the binaries
in /usr/bin, as opposed to most people having the port for it
installed, with the binaries resident in /usr/local/bin?
This can be a win-win situation, can't it?
--
These are my opinions and should not be taken as official Skynet policy
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