Change to bzip2?

[Florian La Roche]

On Wed, Feb 02, 2005 at 06:03:24AM -0800, Steve G wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> With the discussion about trimming specfile changelogs to save space and improve
> downloads...why not go one step further? Mandrake has been using bzip2 for a
> while and it works just as well and files are significantly smaller. The
> conversion could be done in several steps:
> 
> 1) man pages - less already handles bzipped man pages
> 2) info pages - I submited patch in bz #128637 to try to get it working
> 3) tar
> 4) rpms - I'm sure the patch is in Mandrake's version
> 
> Thoughts?

bzip2 is only used for the cpio-packed file-data, the rpm-header is
not compressed. For the repo-data the changelog can also be trimmed,
only if you need to copy the rpm header unmodified this is actually
getting a problem (e.g. if you later-on want to verify the md5sum to
be the same as in full rpms you download or similar things).

I think staying with gzip is ok as it really is a good middle ground
between speed and disk compression ratio. bzip2 "feels" noticable slower.

greetings,

Florian la Roche