Hi all, I had this random idea that many of our distfiles are .tar.gz while more efficient compression methods exist. So I did some testing for fun:
We have ~15k .tar.gz in distfiles. ~6500 .tar.bz2, ~2000 others. A short run over 477 distfiles spanning 833M gave me 586M of .tar.bz2 - roughly 30% more efficient! A comparison run with 7zip gave me 590M files, so bzip2 seems to be quite good. I don't think repackaging every .tar.gz as .tar.bz2 is a reasonable option (breaks MD5 digests, we lose the fallback download from the homepage), but maybe this motivates people to save bandwidth and migrate their packaging to bzip2. Happy hacking, Patrick -- Stand still, and let the rest of the universe move
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