On 24-Jan-00 Brad Knowles wrote:
> At 2:01 PM -0500 2000/1/24, John Baldwin wrote:
>
>> The new install system is probably going to use zip rather than bzip2.
>
> I'm curious as to how a choice like this gets made. Could you
> elaborate?
I did not make the choice personally, I believe that was done by Jordan. If I
remember correctly, the primary reason is that an archive format that easily
and efficiently allows for a subset of the files contained within to be
extracted. [bg]zip'd tarballs require you to uncompress and extract the entire
tarball and then throw away the data you don't use. Since zip integrates the
compression and archiving in one file format, you can look in the zip header,
find the file you want, and then extract and uncompress just its data. This
functionality is key in the design of the new packaging system as packages will
be responsible for extracting themselves in the new system.
--
John Baldwin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
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