On Tue, 26 Jul 2005, Curt Sampson wrote:

> > It's much more efficient to allow multiple files in the same distribution
> > archive to share a compression dictionary.
>
> Ah, I'd forgotten about that. Are multiple passes over the file
> verboten? That would probably be faster than extracting to a staging
> area, anyway.

Multiple passes would not be a problem for faster machines, though it could
make some folks on low end mips or 68k boxes annoyed.  Regardless, it
probably is indeed faster than a staging install.

> > There have been many repeated suggestions/requests to integrate libbz2 into
> > pkg_add so that packages can switch to .tbz format by default.
>
> Well, getting off topic here, but doesn't the default gunzip library do
> those as well? I know that the gunzip command line program certainly
> decompresses bz2 files with no problem.

That's a hack in the NetBSD gzip, using file magic recognition (I believe)
to invoke functions in libbz2 instead of libz.  It isn't standard fare for
GNU-standard gzip.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@duh.org> <tv@pobox.com> <todd@vierling.name>