Change to bzip2?

[Jeff Johnson]

Steve G wrote:

>>Now try to get the -9 changed in rpm.
>>    
>>
>
>brp-compress:
>
>@@ -8,8 +8,8 @@
> cd $RPM_BUILD_ROOT
>
> # Compress man pages
>-COMPRESS="gzip -9 -n"
>-COMPRESS_EXT=.gz
>+COMPRESS="bzip2 -9 -n"
>+COMPRESS_EXT=.bz2
>  
>

The patch is the easy part ;-)

>  
>
>>And it also makes little sense to bzip tarballs that end up in 
>>gzipped payloads imho.
>>    
>>

I was referring to *.src.rpm's, rather than man pages. Apologies for the 
confusion.

>It does when you realize that loading a man page is milliseconds slower to bring
>up using bzip2. And downloading updates via a modem can be 10's of minutes faster
>when they are compressed with bzip2. Compare the size of virtually any tarball:
>kde, kernel, open office, tetex, .... You can fit more packages on an iso CD,
>too.
>  
>

Yep, user response time for man needs to be considered too. So does 
build startup times
when uncompressing big honking tarballs from *.src.rpm's.

>Looking through the bzip2 source code, it looks like its been optimized pretty
>well. But, there is a little room for improvement - even in C and no assembler
>has been added.
>  
>

The threading is prolly a bigger win than any optimize, as bulk data 
decompression is invariably i/o,
not cpu, bound. Trickier when a serial stream is used to concatenate 
blocks, or blocks are chained, too.

73 de Jeff