Re: [Pan-users] Feature request: compressed header lists

[Duncan]

Arnd posted on Tue, 07 Jun 2011 14:22:27 +0000 as excerpted:

> Compressing the files in $HOME/.pan2/groups/ would save a lot of space
> for big groups, and therefore make it easier to take .pan2/ with you
> onto space limited devices like netbooks, and or syncing it between
> computers.
> 
> Ideally this would be a per group setting, with a choosable compress
> format (gzip, bzip2, etc.).
> 
> Or is there a trick to do this right now?

In theory it could be done now, if you're using a filesystem like reiser4 
or btrfs, both of which are supposed to have builtin/plugin on-the-fly 
compression available.

A rather more practical alternative would be using a pan wrapper script 
that among other things, decompresses these files before pan starts, then 
waits around until it closes and recompresses them.  I use a wrapper 
script here for other reasons, but not for file compression.

FWIW, ordinary messages, both text and non-yenc binaries, should compress 
extremely well too, since text and both UUE and base64 encoded binaries 
are not particularly efficient, particularly UUE/base64 encoded binaries.  
However, pan's cache is only 10 MB normally anyway, reasonable as a text 
cache, but it'll blow away REAL fast as a binary cache, so unless you have 
manually increased the cache to multiple gigs as I do...

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman