On 1 August 2013 15:40, Adam Borowski <kilob...@angband.pl> wrote: > On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 06:24:32PM +0200, Guillem Jover wrote: >> [...] in preparation to add non-gzip compression support for control.tar > > May I ask why would you want that? > > There's a lot of extra complexity, incompatibility with existing tools, > added moving parts... and I'm not aware of any gain. > > xz, while vastly superior to gzip and bzip2 for bulk data, suffers from > slow start: for files a few tens of kilobytes or smaller, xz compresses > worse than gzip. Thus, control.tar.xz is hardly ever a good idea. > > On the other hand, control files compress pretty well, so you want _some_ > form of compression. For files this small, CPU costs are totally > negligible. > > Thus, with .tar.gz being either the best or very close to the best, > what would be the point of this change? >
For debian-installer (et. al. components) at the moment control.tar.gz is often larger than data.tar.xz since "templates" are very long and include a lot of translations. So for that package group it's valuable to have control.tar.xz. Regards, Dmitrijs. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/CANBHLUgTASqMtq9w=iBsSo42Fqeo+DK7o0rfqpEB4-h1Ff=1...@mail.gmail.com
