Re: Linux Kernel Source Compression

Bill Davidsen
2006-05-31T22:55:20Z

Alistair John Strachan wrote:

> It's a bit of a shame bzip2 even exists, really. It really would be better if
> there was one unified, pluggable archiver on UNIX (and portables).
>
All the people with slow connections bless bzip2. If you or someone want
a new compressor, write a program for it, call it something unique so
people will know it's different, and be happy.

Even with a fast line, I can only pull as fast as the source can push,
so smaller is better for all of us. The time to decompress a tar.bz2 and
tar.gz are very similar, the CPU for bzip2 is about double, and the time
to create the directories and write the files is the same in either case.

--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
Obscure bug of 2004: BASH BUFFER OVERFLOW - if bash is being run by a
normal user and is setuid root, with the "vi" line edit mode selected,
and the character set is "big5," an off-by-one errors occurs during
wildcard (glob) expansion.