Re: Default compresssion format in pkgsrc & extensions

[Adam Hoka <adam.hoka%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Sun, 3 May 2009 21:57:50 +0100 (BST)
David Brownlee <abs%NetBSD.org@localhost> wrote:

> On Sun, 3 May 2009, Hubert Feyrer wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, 3 May 2009, David Brownlee wrote:
> >>    Its a pit we can't use some higher compression format such as
> >>    7zip's LZMA - some package sizes in gzip, bzip2 and 7z below
> >
> > Why not? (naive question)
> > Those numbers sure look impressive...
> >
> > FWIW, we started out with .tgz as that's exactly what's in a package. When 
> > I 
> > added .tbz it was to handle bzip2 archives. I'm not sure if differencing by 
> > name is needed by today's tar/pax. If it's smart enough to DTRT regardless 
> > of 
> > the extension, using a single extension is fine to me - I agree that the 
> > pattern you quoted is ugly, and takes needless cycles when resolving 
> > dependencies.
> 
>       pkg_install is using libarchive nowdays, so should be able to
>       handle tarfiles compressed with gzip, bzip2 or (or compress),
>       or even zipfiles transparently, so it *should* not be an issue
>       any more.
> 
>       7zip's LZMA is LGPL'd, and lacks real unix permission bits (though
>       the latter item may be less of an issue now). The numbers in my
>       previous email also relied on 7zip compressing and packing
>       the files directly rather than putting them into a tarfile
>       first. If someone were to add LZMA support to libarchive then
>       pkgsrc could use it 'for free', but I feel that is a future
>       possible discussion :)

FYI, the LZMA SDK from 7zip is public domain since version 4.62.

-- 
Adam Hoka <adam.hoka%gmail.com@localhost>