ideas 3

[Andreas Hauser]

dillon wrote @ Sun, 15 Aug 2004 12:29:47 -0700 (PDT):
> 
> :>     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.
> :
> :
> :With 7z i get a 49 MB file instead of the 79 MB with gzip.
> :See archivers/p7zip and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7z
> :
> :http://a.ftp.fortunaty.net/DragonFly/iso-images/dfly-1.0A_REL.iso.7z
> :
> :Andy
>  
>      I looked at it, but I don't think we are going to use it.  It looks
>      like a mess of different algorithms and I don't trust that the long
>      term (30 year horizon) stability and compatibility will be there.

No, it's just a tool and archive format that can like most others use
more than one algorithm, the interesting being LZMA.
So 7z is like tar with some compression programm - using LZMA by default
instead of LZ77 (gzip), BWT + Huffman Coding (bzip2), LZW (compress),
Huffman coding (pack).
So not a mess but a rich menu (like we already have) with some new
and better choices (LZMA and PPMD) and a new carte format.
If someone really thinks about integrating it i would imagine him (her)
only to implement LZMA and add an option to tar/libarchive to use it.


But i really just meant to use it for the iso-images.
I'll try to make those available for future releases.

Andy