hi.
I've noticed that some tar balls are getting created using the lzma
format as a download option (ftp.gnu.org and Imagemagik being the latest
two I've noticed) with the file size being significantly smaller than bz2.
I just did a very scientific benchmark on compression tools (that is ran
them once on a single fileset), and noticed that with the latest httpd
tar ball I can achieve a 1M reduction in filesize (~20%) when using
lzma. the only downside about using lzma is that it is S*L*O*W to
compress files (seems fast enough in decompression though)
The lzma format is supported in the latest version of gnutar (1.21) as
an option 'J' and there are windows versions of it out there as well,
but it is not a standard package in most distributions yet.
anyway.. I thought I'd start a thread about it. 20% savings seemed
pretty big to me.
Regards
Ian
