On Mon 05 Oct 1998, Paul Slootman wrote: > On Sun 04 Oct 1998, James Troup wrote: > > Joseph Carter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > > > Old/slow/lomem machines can't properly compile X or Mozilla anyway. > > > > Bzzt. I've compiled xfree86 for Debian/m68k on a 386/25 equivalent > > with only 14Mb (don't ask) of memory several times. Took 5 days, > > 14MB isn't that lomem...
BTW, I just had a look at the new bzip2 version. This are the relevant lines from top while running 'bz2cat <linux-2.1.124.tar.bz2 | bzip2 >x': PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT LIB %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND 30413 paul 20 0 6820 6820 288 R 0 72.0 10.7 3:55 bzip2 30412 paul 0 0 3928 3928 288 S 0 23.5 6.2 0:48 bz2cat Decompressing doesn't take that much time nor memory, if I compare it for example with my X server: 265 root 0 0 15028 11M 1004 S 0 0.5 19.0 542:35 XF86_SVGA Of course, 4MB is still quite a lot, but I guess that should be doable for just about everyone. Alternatively, from the manpage: Compression and decompression requirements, in bytes, can be estimated as: Compression: 400k + ( 7 x block size ) Decompression: 100k + ( 4 x block size ), or 100k + ( 2.5 x block size ) and For files compressed with the default 900k block size, bunzip2 will require about 3700 kbytes to decompress. To support decompression of any file on a 4 megabyte machine, bunzip2 has an option to decompress using approximately half this amount of memory, about 2300 kbytes. Decompres sion speed is also halved, so you should use this option only where necessary. The relevant flag is -s. So, I think that some experimentation of what block sizes and flags to use may be in order. Besides, as decompression is done internally by dpkg (right?), dpkg could check the memory available on the machine and decide which decompression algorithm to use. In short, I don't really think that there are compelling arguments _not_ to consider bzip2. And yes, x ended up identical to linux-2.1.124.tar.bz2 in case you're wondering :-) Paul Slootman -- home: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | work: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | debian: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wurtel.demon.nl | Murphy Software, Enschede, the Netherlands