Adam Borowski writes: > On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 11:25:11AM +0200, Ansgar wrote: >> It supports solid compression[1] which >> compresses multiple files into one block like tar.xz, but unlike tar.xz >> can use more than one block: "Later versions of 7-zip use a variable >> solid block size, so that only a limited amount of data must be >> processed in order to extract one file". > > Yeah but the default block size is 2GB, which would make every single .deb > in the archive effectively fully solid. You can fine-tune the values, but > example numbers don't appear like they'd help much. > > And just tested, -ms=on vs -ms=16m: > -rw-r--r-- 1 kilobyte kilobyte 1087957645 May 13 14:37 u.7z > -rw-r--r-- 1 kilobyte kilobyte 1253369019 May 13 14:50 u16m.7z > > So the space loss is massive.
That indeed looks like it likely not worth switching to a different format to allow better random access (which is more of a special-use case anyway). Thank you for your experiments! Ansgar