Re: Smaller compressed kernel source tarballs?

[Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu>]

On Sun, Oct 01, 2006 at 10:11:49PM -0700, David Lang wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Oct 2006, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> 
> >A lot of improvement can be made in tar to compress better archive with
> >large number of small files such as the kernel. You just have to see the
> >difference in archive size depending on the base directory name. If you
> >come up with something really interesting which does not alter the output
> >format nor the compression time, it might get a place in the git-tar-tree
> >command. But IMHO, it would me more interesting to further reduce patches
> >size than tarballs size, since patches might be downloaded far more often.
> 
> I just had what's probably a silly thought.
> 
> as an alturnative to useing tar, what about useing a git pack?

Nice idea, but I tried on 2.4 : 43 MB for git-pack vs 38 for tar.gz and
31 for tar.bz2. However, it is blazingly fast. 4 seconds vs 30 for tar.gz
(hot cache).

When speed is important, it's a clear winner. When size matters, it's not
the best solution.

Regards,
Willy