> Well, the tar version compresses much better than zip because it is > streaming and doesn't have an index. since you tar then gzip, it > doesn't > compress each patch independently but rather compresses a single > stream > containing all the patches. since patches are extremely similar, this > results in substantial improvements over individually compressing each > file like zip does in order to individually access them via its index.
Really? Perhaps you were talking about "zip" [1], but I am talking about "7z" a.k.a. "7-zip" [2]. I decided to measure this on my allmydata.org repository. Hopefully the names are self-explanatory. The first two are ones that are actually implemented by darcs at this time. $ du -sk * # So the numbers are in KiB 81592 trunk-nocompress-individual-patches 48980 trunk-gz-individual-patches 44528 trunk-7z-individual-patches 18784 trunk-tar-gz-all-at-once 10644 trunk-tar-7z-all-at-once 10600 trunk-7z-all-at-once So basically, it would be interesting if some Haskell hacker wanted to make 7z archives (or else 7z-compressed tarballs) available in through a Haskell interface. Depending on your filesystem and your usage, it might well be that the result is faster as well as more compact (they key to being faster would be to avoid a seek() that wasn't already cached by your filesystem. Obviously tighter compression can help with this.). Regards, Zooko [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_(file_format) [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7z _______________________________________________ darcs-devel mailing list darcs-devel@darcs.net http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-devel
