ideas 3

[Matthew Dillon]

:On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 05:11:23PM +0200, Erik P. Skaalerud wrote:
:> I think he's talking about the new package system when its used, also 
:> compression of our iso-images.
:
:For the ISO image IMO the compression/decompression time vs. time saving
:is too bad. It took me ages on a P4 to compress the image :)
:
:Joerg
:
:> 
:> Erik

    Well, I dunno.  bzip2 is now fairly ubiquitous in the world of UNIX,
    and it does produce ~17% better compressed ISOs.  While I don't think
    it is a good general choice due to its lack of flexibility in cpu
    consumption (1), it may be a good choice for ISO distribution.  bzip2 -9
    produces a 70MB file while gzip -9 produces an 82MB file.

    I will consider it for the next release.

    note 1: bzip2 takes 22 seconds to decompress the ISO on my AMD64 box
    where gzip takes only 3, and while bzip2 -9 and gzip -9 compression
    times are about the same at ~50-60 seconds, bzip2 -2 also takes ~50-60
    seconds while gzip -2 only takes 11.  So gzip is far more cpu efficient
    in general terms.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>