X.Org 6.8.2 - (most probably) final patch

[Dejan Lesjak]

On Monday 21 of February 2005 13:11, Jon Noack wrote:
> The build space is not a big deal to me; my machines have adequate free
> space to handle it.  However, it's not fun to extract the full tarball
> on older/slower machines.  Having to do it a 17 times is downright
> painful.  Using tar exclusions doesn't solve the speed issue, because
> the tarball still has to be decompressed and searched.  For example,
> let's exclude every subdirectory in the tarball (leaving only the files
> in xc/) and compare the time and space needed to a full extraction on my
> dual PentiumIII 933MHz w/ 2GB RAM (NOTE: this is using bsdtar on
> 5.3-STABLE.  I also tried gtar and the results were similar):
[snip results]
> Check out the user times; there are almost identical.  As one would
> expect, the full extract takes longer because the data has to be written
> to disk (see sys time).

Indeed they would be identical because of the way tar works - with cpio things 
would be different.
What could help here is if we switch from bzipped tarball to gzipped one. This 
would speed extraction at the expense of larger distfile (with of course more 
bandwidth needed to fetch).

> My point is that we can easily resolve the build space issue with
> exclusions, but there remains an issue with CPU usage.  Even using
> exclusions, my machine would still spend at least 17 minutes JUST
> EXTRACTING THE TARBALL when installing or upgrading X.Org.  That's a
> lot.  If at all possible, it would be great if we could convince the
> X.Org folks to bring back the split tarballs...

This should also be better with gzipped vs bzipped tarballs. I don't have any 
preference here. I'd like to know what we should be more concerned about here 
- size of distfile or the speed of extraction. Please keep in mind though 
that some people pay internet access by used bandwidth (and it's not cheap in 
some cases). Here are both sizes for comparison:
lesi at idefix:~/tmp/distfiles% ll
total 98176
-rw-r--r--  1 lesi  lesi  44371402 Feb 16 15:50 X11R6.8.2-src.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r--  1 lesi  lesi  56047552 Feb  9 20:13 X11R6.8.2-src.tar.gz
lesi at idefix:~/tmp/distfiles% ll -h
total 98176
-rw-r--r--  1 lesi  lesi    42M Feb 16 15:50 X11R6.8.2-src.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r--  1 lesi  lesi    53M Feb  9 20:13 X11R6.8.2-src.tar.gz


The X.Org folks have a mailing list: 
http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
to where these concerns should probably be directed. As I've said these 
concerns were already pointed out at that list and the README files on 
ftp.x.org and mirrors still imply that split distfiles are comming. So, 
having no announcement or some kind of mail to say otherwise I'm still 
expecting them :)


Dejan