Change to bzip2?

[Hans Kristian Rosbach]

On Wed, 2005-02-02 at 18:09, Phil Knirsch wrote:
*snip*
> For binary rpms otoh it's different as there you want a quick 
> installation, so uncompression speed does matter there, and the 
> difference for the binary payload compress with bzip2 and gzip should be 
> considerably less drastic than with source tarballs.
*snip*
> So the speed difference in unpacking is about 1:10, size difference is 
> about 1.12:1 which clearly demonstrates my point. I don't want my 
> installation to take 10 times longer for the sake of 12% space saving in 
> the binary rpms.
*snip*

In the last company I worked for, we rolled our own distro. Admittedly
it did not use rpms, we just used tar files and extracted them into
the right places during install.

Now, difference between gzip -9 and bzip2 -9 was quite surprising.
We had expected bzip2 to be slower to install but a big win in space.

Actually it turned out that our iso went down from about 350MB to 200MB,
and installtimes went from 7min to 5min (approx). We reallised that the
install was not really cpu bound, but it was heavily cdrom-io bound.

I don't have exact numbers since I dont work there anymore..

And that was my 2 cents.

-HK