|
From: | Matthew Woehlke |
Subject: | Re: gzip vs. bzip2 |
Date: | Thu, 05 Apr 2007 10:34:37 -0500 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.10) Gecko/20070221 Thunderbird/1.5.0.10 Mnenhy/0.7.4.0 |
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 0m1.982suser 0m1.924s sys 0m0.040s$ time bunzip2 -c < coreutils-6.9.tar.bz2 > /dev/null real 0m12.347suser 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>
[Prev in Thread] | Current Thread | [Next in Thread] |