Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 12:16:32 +0100 (CET) From: Oliver Fromme <olli@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de> To: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: bzip2 in src tree Message-ID: <200001241116.MAA41036@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de> In-Reply-To: <86ghar$13c3$1@atlantis.rz.tu-clausthal.de>
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David O'Brien <obrien@freebsd.org> wrote in list.freebsd-current:
> On Sun, Jan 23, 2000 at 10:26:48AM +0100, Oliver Fromme wrote:
>>
>> Saving 10% or 20% on disk space is not worth wasting >= 10 times more
>> CPU time than gzip. Disk space is cheap nowadays, but upgrading to a
>> CPU that is 10 times faster is not.
>
> And just how do I increase the space on a CDROM???
Include another CD-ROM.
> Go look how many port distribution files on your last CDROM set were in
> bzip2 format -- there is a reason for that.
I think that's because some people -- especially Linux people,
as it seems -- think that bzip is ``new and cool''. :-)
>> (I once tried to compress our FreeBSD ISO images with bzip2,
>> just to compare the space savings with gzip. I aborted the
>> experiment after 6 hours (!). gzip took about 30 minutes.
>> Consequently, bzip2 was considered unusable and went into the
>> trash can.)
>
> Am I the only one that uses UNIX as a multitasking OS?
> nice the bzip2 process by 20 and background it. Geez.
Then it would have taken even longer. Sometimes you have
deadlines, and waiting a few hours longer is just not an
option. (In this case I finally decided to not even gzip
the stuff, because it saved only a few percent of space.)
But this is getting off-topic. I think everyone is entitled
to his own opinion about the usefulness of bzip2. But I have
yet to hear a good reason why it should replace gzip in the
base system of FreeBSD. Not that my opinion matters, though.
:-)
Using bzip2 for the FreeBSD distribution sets would increase
the minimum memory requirement by 4 Mbyte (or about 2.5 Mbyte
using the -s option of bunzip2, but which doubles decompression
time).
Regards
Oliver
--
Oliver Fromme, Leibnizstr. 18/61, 38678 Clausthal, Germany
(Info: finger userinfo:olli@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de)
"In jedem Stück Kohle wartet ein Diamant auf seine Geburt"
(Terry Pratchett)
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