Re: Linux Kernel Source Compression

[Sam Vilain <sam@vilain.net>]

Chris Wedgwood wrote:

>On Sun, May 21, 2006 at 08:03:32PM +0100, Alistair John Strachan wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Somebody needs to make lzma userspace tools (like p7zip) faster, not
>>crash, and behave like a regular UNIX program. Then we need a patch
>>to GNU tar to emerge, and for it to persist for at least 4
>>years. Then maybe people will adopt this format..
>>    
>>
>
>why?
>
>the gains aren't that great
>

Exactly, and while I know my network connection isn't exactly
representative of the general population of people building the kernel,
it's currently faster for me to download and unpack a .gz than to wait
the extra time for bzip2 to decompress. I've always found it quicker
dealing with .gz's for incremental patches. I thought the speed issue is
more of a speed / compression ratio trade-off, ie a caveat of
compression in general.

Mind you, 'git fetch' is even faster, even for people who aren't close
enough to their mirror to fetch a full .gz kernel tarball in <5s.

Sam.