Hi, distributions like slackware and fedora moved to the "xz" compression a while ago, even the kernel developers think about abandoning the ".tar.gz" file format in favor of alternatives with better compression like ".tar.bz2" or ".tar.xz" (or short: ".txz").
if we want to try doing something like that too, opensc 0.12 would be a good time. for reference, I checked current trunk with all options: size file name / format 2416782 opensc-0.12.0-svn.shar.gz 1135736 opensc-0.12.0-svn.tar.bz2 1519708 opensc-0.12.0-svn.tar.gz 1009746 opensc-0.12.0-svn.tar.lzma 1009948 opensc-0.12.0-svn.tar.xz 2508011 opensc-0.12.0-svn.tar.Z 1922452 opensc-0.12.0-svn.zip uncompression time: opensc-0.12.0-svn.shar.gz real 0m10.836s user 0m3.760s sys 0m7.120s opensc-0.12.0-svn.tar.bz2 real 0m0.328s user 0m0.280s sys 0m0.040s opensc-0.12.0-svn.tar.gz real 0m0.116s user 0m0.030s sys 0m0.030s opensc-0.12.0-svn.tar.lzma real 0m0.156s user 0m0.120s sys 0m0.090s opensc-0.12.0-svn.tar.xz real 0m0.173s user 0m0.070s sys 0m0.120s opensc-0.12.0-svn.tar.Z real 0m0.119s user 0m0.030s sys 0m0.080s opensc-0.12.0-svn.zip real 0m0.416s user 0m0.150s sys 0m0.070s so tar.xz would be 50% smaller than tar.gz, but still uncompress quite fast. compression of xz files is of course much slower than gzip (about factor 20), and uses a lot of memory, but that only affects people creating new tar.xz files. most linux distributions have "xz-utils" installed or available in their repository, so users would need to do nothing / simply install those. command line: "tar xf file" works on all formats - tar, tar.gz, tar.xz etc, so simply drop the "z" option when extracting, and tar will figure out which compression format the file has and how to decompress it. for reference, the packaging option is "j" for bzip2 and "J" for xz I think. AM_AUTOMAKE_INIT takes options like "dist-bzip2" or "dist-xz" and will then generate those matching files. windows users can continue to use the free "7-zip" to extract tar.gz files, but for tar.xz they need to use the 9.00 version (currently in beta test), the old 4.* version won't work. in summary: I'm not sure at all, if it is worth the trouble to switch from tar.gz to some better compression. we don't have many people downloading files, no bandwidth issues or anything like that. on the other hand distributions are happy to save disk space etc. if source packages are using a better compression mechanism. I reviewed latest trends, what other people do and so on, and I believe if we want to swich to a different compression, then tar.xz is the current recommendation. it is new, and not everyone has those tools for it installed, but already enough people use it so it won't be a big pain. what do you think? keep tar.gz? switch to tar.xz? something else? Regards, Andreas _______________________________________________ opensc-devel mailing list opensc-devel@lists.opensc-project.org http://www.opensc-project.org/mailman/listinfo/opensc-devel
