packages compressed with xz

[jhell]

On 11/29/2010 18:40, Matthias Andree wrote:
> Am 29.11.2010 19:31, schrieb jhell:
> 
>> Adding to this, as the manual says... The decompressing host will need
>> to have at minimal 5% -> 20% of memory 'available' for decompression of
>> what the compressing host had. Seeing as FreeBSD still runs on systems
>> with memory as little as 200MB "~20% of 1024MB" and quite possible to
>> run on systems with memory of 64MB "~5% of 1024MB" I would not see any
>> benefit in modifying the default memory limit on a compressing host to
>> accommodate for these system rather than using gzip(1) or bzip2(1) by
>> default.
> 
> You can specify limits during compression, so the question is should we do that
> so that hosts with N MB of RAM can decompress packages?  Do we retain the
> compression ratio over bzip2 if we limit compression memory to 512 MB so that
> decompression would be possible with, say, 128 MB?
> 

Hosts that have [N]MB of "free or available" memory. Most systems in
this case will not have a whole lot of RAM available in any case as they
are likely to be utilizing it to its upper most potential. Doing such
limiting on the compressors part I would think, be more of a waste of
resources as such can be achieved by default just sticking with bzip2(1).

Besides, limiting memory to 512MB to what ? shave an ~ small percentage
off the top of a resulting package.

>> It would be nice to support xz(1) compression for large selective
>> packages like firefox or openoffice as those will never run on smaller
>> systems.
> 
> Yes, would be nice.  I doubt it will happen soon.
> 

Agreed. Soon can be quantified by actual need and of which there is not
much need except for larger packages but adding this would just add
unneeded complication to the system that is already in place.

~ JMO

-- 

 jhell,v