Ryan Schmidt wrote:
Is using 7z for downloads really worth the extra compile, etc. time for the decompressor required, and the (presumably) longer decompression time?IMHO, definitely, which is why the use_7z option was added to MacPorts base. Processors in today's computers are extremely fast, so the decompression time is practically nothing. All ports should switch to 7z or similar highly-compressed alternatives to gz and bz2 if available. lzma and xz are good choices too, though MacPorts doesn't yet have a use_xz option. The lzma, xz and 7z formats can all use the lzma compression algorithm.
Using .7z isn't a good option in the same way that using .zip isn't optimal. If you want the LZMA compression, it would be better to use .tar.lzma instead ? Even better is to use LZMA2 in form of .tar.xz, when that has been added/released*.
* XZ Utils is still in beta (thus port "xz-devel"), see http:// tukaani.org/xz/
The p7zip 9.04 bz2 distfile is 3.6 MB. This plus the size of the ImageMagick 6.5.6-1 7z distfile (5.7 MB) is only slightly larger than the size of the ImageMagick 6.5.6-1 bz2 distfile (8.6 MB). So if the user did not already have p7zip, then it will take a little longer this one time, but for every subsequent update, it's a win.
Using xz instead of bz2 is a good alternative, since it makes smaller files and is faster to decompress (it takes longer to compress, but that's server-side/once). It does *not* replace gz however, as there are lots of cases where gzip is "good enough" (and faster).
But I don't think you should use the .7z format, use compressed .tar instead.
--anders _______________________________________________ macports-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-dev
