Harald Schilly wrote:
> On Dec 3, 12:58 pm, "Dr. David Kirkby" <david.kir...@onetel.net>
> wrote:
>> I've not checked out the claims of the speedup (in fact, I've not even
>> downloaded its source code yet), but assuming it does work reaonsably well,
>> what
>> are your thoughts on implementing this?
>
> Is the compression ratio the same?
I've not checked it. I'm busy today, so will not have chance to until much
later
in the day.
> I've nothing against using it, but
> I don't think it makes much sense. The major time consuming part in
> building a binary distribution is the compilation and bzip2 isn't very
> slow. I would much more like to see lzma as a default ( tar --lzma -
> cf ...tar.lzma dir/ would be the command ) which is really slower, but
> compresses >30% better and is well supported as far as i can say.
tar --lzma is not POSIX
In contrast tar cvf - some_directory | lzma -option_to_write_to_stdout >
filename.tar.lz
would be my choice. Let's try to rid Sage of GNUisms, not introduce more of
them.
I'm not so sure lzma is well supported
bash-3.2$ cat /etc/release
OpenSolaris 2009.06 snv_111b X86
Copyright 2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Use is subject to license terms.
Assembled 07 May 2009
bash-3.2$ lzma
bash: lzma: command not found
(I realise it might exist on most linux distros, and if its linux binaries,
perhaps it does not matter if the command exists or not on another system. One
option might be to create them on Linux, but not on other systems. Of the
machines I have here running
* Solaris 10
* OpenSolaris
* Windows
* HP-UX
not one of them ships with the lzma binary.
Even if lzma does exists, I'm not sure how many people know what to do with it.
I'm not sure if its the same as p7zip.
/usr/bin/p7zip: compressed data not written to a terminal.
For help, type: /usr/bin/p7zip -h
which quite recent versions of Solaris have, but not older releases.
I would suspect a high percentage of people would not have the software to
extract it, and so it would put them off.
> How about distributing the linux binaries of the next release lzma
> only?
I think it would be unwise myself. Offer them in lzma, bzip2 and gzip, and get
some stats about what people prefer to download.
To me, gzip is the best known, bzip2 is pretty well known, but lzma is quite
rare, and so people will be less familiar with it.
There is software which can create self-extracting binaries, (Makeself being
one). So you just type
./sage-install.sh
and it installs. It relies of gzip, so does not get great compression. However,
its probably possible to add inside a lzma binary, which extracts the main part
of the file.
Dave
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