Re: gzip vs. bzip2

[Matthew Woehlke]

Bruno Haible wrote:
> Eric Blake wrote:
> > Lately, many packages ship both .gz and .bz2 tarballs, although automake still 
> > defaults to .gz only.  Is it time to more heavily encourage .bz2?
>
> bzip2 is about 6 times slower upon decompression:
>
> $ time gunzip -c < coreutils-6.9.tar.gz > /dev/null 
> real    0m1.982s
> user    0m1.924s
> sys     0m0.040s
> $ time bunzip2 -c < coreutils-6.9.tar.bz2 > /dev/null 
> real    0m12.347s
> user    0m12.197s
> sys     0m0.074s
>
> Therefore, for the purpose of "let's have a quick look at the sourcecode of
> this or that package", .gz tarballs are better suited than .bz2 tarballs.
> Those for whom a .bz2 tarball makes sense are those who download a package,
> install it, and never again look at the sourcecode.

It's not that simple. The question 'which is better' depends on your 
processor speed and (since, unless you are getting it on CD-ROM or 
something, you have to download a tarball first) your Internet 
bandwidth. Therefore you have to balance the additional extraction time 
against the time savings of having fewer bytes to transfer, and that's a 
 multi-variable equation.

Anyway, I don't understand your argument. If I want to be able to look 
at the code quickly, I am going to extract once and leave the stuff 
sitting around. If I'm concerned about space, I may want the smaller 
.bz2. If I want to look at a version I don't have, well then I have to 
download it and now we are back to balancing bandwidth vs. CPU power.

--
Matthew
<insert bad pun... on second thought, better not>