On Tue, 18 Dec 2007, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Chris Cheney writes ("Bug#456332: dpkg could use an elevated pre-depends or
> depends on lzma"):
> > dpkg supports using lzma for compression of debs however it only
> > suggests the lzma binary package which is what is _currently_ used for
> > decompressing the debs. In the future it would be preferable if a
> > liblzma package existed that dpkg could use similarly to how it uses
> > libbz2. IMHO packages should not pre-depend on the lzma binary package
> > since it is an implementation level detail of how dpkg supports lzma
> > binaries currently. So dpkg needs to pre-depends/depends on the lzma
> > binary package so that packages can use lzma compression. However
> > packages using lzma compression will need a pre-depends on the correct
> > version of dpkg (the one with the depends/pre-depends on lzma).
>
> IMO the lzma binary package should Provide a new virtual package name,
> lzma-deb-support or some such. Packages could Pre-Depend on that.
What does it bring?
> (How valuable is lzma compression?)
The figures on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/dpkg-lzma are self-explanatory IMO.
It decompresses faster than bzip2, the compression ratio is way better.
The downside is that it uses quite a lot of memory and time to compress the
package.
Decompression also takes more memory than bzip2 but with 32M for
the bigger packages, I think it's okay.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog
Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch :
http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/
