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Date:      Sat, 2 Jan 1999 19:41:24 +0000 (GMT)
From:      Michael Searle <searle@longacre.demon.co.uk>
To:        ports@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Policy on bzip2?
Message-ID:  <Marcel-1.46-0102194124-0b0cjo5@longacre.demon.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <XFMail.990101204155.asmodai@wxs.nl>

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On Fri 01 Jan, Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai wrote:
> On 01-Jan-99 Kris Kennaway wrote:
> > On Fri, 1 Jan 1999, Satoshi Asami wrote:
> > 
> >>  * Is there a policy on when it's good to use bzipped distfiles (which are
> >>  * usually much smaller than their gzipped counterparts)? For those of us with
> >>  * slow network links, the extra ~30% compression is extremely handy (not to
> >>  * mention better for conserving bandwidth on the net generally). Lots of
> 
> >> Unless it is much slower for decompression (I believe it's only slower 
> >> for compression), I don't see any.  Having smaller distfiles will help 
> >> us (ftp, CDROM) too.

It is several times slower for decompression as well, and requires a lot more
memory than gunzip (even in low memory, low speed mode). On a fast machine
bunzip2 decompresses at about 500K/s (or 250K/s in low memory mode) while gunzip
gets 3500K/s, so while it would speed up most net installs it would slow down a
CD install. 

> > 
> > In my experience this is correct. www/lynx-current is one candidate for this -
> > the distfile is about 1.3M compared to 1.7M.
> 
> Just make sure the new releases of FreeBSD include bzip as standard then. Or make
> it so that the dependencies require bzip. Although when we are going to bzip
> files for inclusion with the CD-ROM set, then it is necessary to make it a
> /usr/bin addition IMHO. And which one will be the default: bzip or bzip2? I don't
> know too much about the changes between both, anyone care to enlighten?
>

Bzip is no longer supported as it contains patented arithmetic coding compression.
Bzip2 replaces this with Huffman coding. 



-- 
csubl@csv.warwick.ac.uk


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