[tz] [PROPOSED PATCH 1/2] Also distribute code and data in a single tarball

Steffen Nurpmeso steffen at sdaoden.eu
Tue Aug 23 13:30:41 UTC 2016


Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
 |Robert Elz wrote:
 |> Old style distribution was a single file containing both code and data.
 |> It was split because it was more manageable (for everyone) that way

 |> ps: I don't really see any need for a better compression technique than
 |> what is currently used (or really, for that matter, any compression \
 |> at all.)

 |Granted, if you're well connected all these sizes are small. But if you're 
 |paying for each kilobyte of download, a 36% savings over split .gz format \
 |(84% 
 |savings from raw tarballs) is nice to have.

I concur, enterily general that is, it really matters, especially
so on the country even in highly developed countries (talking
about Germany).

E.g., i have just recently contributed a message to a DragonFly
BSD thread, though only in spirit because my messages go to
/dev/null (last message of mine reported "fcntl(2) lock on
/dev/null fails with EINVAL", so that is probably fixed (ha ha))

 ||Its getting harder and harder to fit a reasonable base dist onto a CD.  \
 ||I really recommend using the USB disk image instead of trying to burn \
 ||an ISO.
 |
 |I didn't want to start a thread, but now jumping in to add that
 |the release image was only about 170 MB when compressed with
 |xz(1), which would have saved ~100 MB download (and archive
 |storage) compared to bzip2.  (This matters here, more often than
 |not).

--steffen


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