[tex-live] TL-CD compression

Giuseppe Ghibò ghibo at mandriva.com
Sun Jun 3 13:22:09 CEST 2007


Karl Berry ha scritto:

>     the difference is 72.412 MB.
> 
> I am doubtful that even that will be enough to make the difference
> between including all packages or not.  I fear that a completely
> different install routine will be needed (which it will be anyway if the
> new infrastructure comes to pass), one that does not assume the same set
> of packages are in both distributions.  Or drop inst altogether.
> Or something.
> 
>     Are there any good reasons not to use .tar.bz2 instead of .zip?
> 
> We actually tried bz2 at one point, and my recollection is that Fabrice
> said the slow decompression made a *huge* difference.
> 
> By the way, I have heard that 9zip does even better compression than
> bz2.  Don't know about decompression speed.
> 
> karl

How about to still use .tar but using "lzma -9" compression over
bzip2 or gzip? The lzma uses the same algorithm of
7zip (p7zip un Unix world, 7za command name), but works on single files
(which so can be the known .tar) rather than on archive.

Usually the lzma compresses 30% better than gzip and 15%
better than bzip2. Uncompression on lzma is way
faster than bzip2, let's say around 20-25 MB/s over
an Athlon64 3000-3500.

An .src.rpm of lzma (e.g. used on MandrivaLinux) is this one:

http://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/MandrivaLinux/devel/2007.1/SRPMS/main/release/lzma-4.43-2mdv2007.1.src.rpm

If you give me the URL of the uncompressed .tar (but it shouldn't contain
any .zip file, as those can't be compressed further) I will post
some benchmark and compress ratio comparison using lzma.

Bye
Giuseppe.


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