Subject: Re: Proposal: new binary package format
To: Adam Ciarcinski <adam@pulstar.albedo.com.pl>
From: Simon Burge <simonb@netbsd.org>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 05/31/1999 19:45:02
Adam Ciarcinski wrote:

> > with our current format a binary package is an ".tar.gz" archive which
> 
> My proposal: let's use bzip2 instead of gzip, since it gives better
> compresson, doesn't it?

As I've said in a couple of different forums in a couple of different
discussions, bzip2 needs more memory to decompress that gzip - about
3700kB using the best compression with the default extraction arguments.
It's also bl**dy slow.

I'm all for better compression, but think of VAXes and other small
memory machines paging just to extract an archive of some sort...

Simon.