Re: Default compresssion format in pkgsrc & extensions

[David Brownlee <abs%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Sun, 3 May 2009, Hubert Feyrer wrote:

> On Sun, 3 May 2009, David Brownlee wrote:
> >         Its a pit we can't use some higher compression format such as
> >         7zip's LZMA - some package sizes in gzip, bzip2 and 7z below
>
> Why not? (naive question)
> Those numbers sure look impressive...
>
> FWIW, we started out with .tgz as that's exactly what's in a package. When I 
> added .tbz it was to handle bzip2 archives. I'm not sure if differencing by 
> name is needed by today's tar/pax. If it's smart enough to DTRT regardless of 
> the extension, using a single extension is fine to me - I agree that the 
> pattern you quoted is ugly, and takes needless cycles when resolving 
> dependencies.

        pkg_install is using libarchive nowdays, so should be able to
        handle tarfiles compressed with gzip, bzip2 or (or compress),
        or even zipfiles transparently, so it *should* not be an issue
        any more.

        7zip's LZMA is LGPL'd, and lacks real unix permission bits (though
        the latter item may be less of an issue now). The numbers in my
        previous email also relied on 7zip compressing and packing
        the files directly rather than putting them into a tarfile
        first. If someone were to add LZMA support to libarchive then
        pkgsrc could use it 'for free', but I feel that is a future
        possible discussion :)

--
                David/absolute       -- www.NetBSD.org: No hype required --