"Nathan J. Williams" wrote:

> matthew green <mrg@eterna.com.au> writes:
> 
> > hmmm i'd say no in general [*]; we support building .bz2 versions
> > of packages and we should do it for base - it _has_ been the plan
> > to switch to bz2 distros hasn't it?  just never done?  :-)
> 
> Has it? bz2 is really, really, really slow on our older architectures,
> compared to gzip.

It also has "large" memory requirements as well.  A bzip2 -9 archive
will need 3.7MB of memory for it decompression tables (or 2.3MB if you
use the -s option to bunzip2 which we don't support in gzip AFAIK).
This rules out installs in 4MB machines and probably wouldn't help 8MB
machines.

Using -s with bunzip2 ~halves the decompression speed as well, so we
don't want to enable it by default.  Maybe have gzip fetch the amount
of RAM on the machine and automatically enable "small" mode if there's
less that 16MB or 32MB of RAM?

Simon.
--
Simon Burge                            <simonb@wasabisystems.com>
NetBSD Support and Service:         http://www.wasabisystems.com/