Re: Linux 2.6.33-rc7

From: Pádraig Brady
Date: Tue Feb 09 2010 - 06:40:13 EST


On 06/02/10 22:49, Linus Torvalds wrote:
Oh, and I forgot to ask one thing I had intended to ask in the release
notes..

Do people really care about the old-fashioned tar.gz and patch.gz files?
I've always uploaded the tar-files and patches compressed with gzip,
because that's the "traditional" way, and then we have a script that also
re-compresses things as 'bz2' because it compresses better and many people
are bandwidth-limited and much prefer the better compression.

Of course, if you really care about bandwidth, you're better off just
fetching the git trees instead, but the question for non-git users is:

Would it be ok to _only_ have the 'bz2' patches and tar-balls?

Having two copies of every large file seems silly, if nobody really
requires the traditional .gz format..

For reference, we've stopped releasing bz2 files for the coreutils project.
We use gz for compatibility and xz for increased compression ratio/decompression speed.

$ rpm -q xz gzip bzip2
xz-4.999.9-0.1.beta.20091007git.fc11.i586
gzip-1.3.12-10.fc11.i586
bzip2-1.0.5-5.fc11.i586

$ bzip2 -dc linux-2.6.33-rc7.tar.bz2 | xz > linux-2.6.33-rc7.tar.xz
$ xz -dc linux-2.6.33-rc7.tar.xz | gzip > linux-2.6.33-rc7.tar.gz
$ l
-rw-rw-r-- 1 padraig 66,191,954 Feb 6 22:27 linux-2.6.33-rc7.tar.bz2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 padraig 56,347,392 Feb 9 11:17 linux-2.6.33-rc7.tar.xz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 padraig 85,300,209 Feb 9 11:20 linux-2.6.33-rc7.tar.gz

$ time bzip2 -dc linux-2.6.33-rc7.tar.bz2 >/dev/null
real 0m30.132s
$ time gzip -dc linux-2.6.33-rc7.tar.gz >/dev/null
real 0m4.996s
$ time xz -dc linux-2.6.33-rc7.tar.xz >/dev/null
real 0m11.003s

cheers,
Pádraig.
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