A colleague pointed out to me that doing a full build of NetBSD results in a lot of time spent doing gzip -9, as much as 8 minutes for all the sets on a modern x86 machine. For bits that will be downloaded by many, this makes sense. I found that -4 resulted in what is to me a good tradeoff in build time and space, reducing this to a minute or so with tolerable size increase. It seems the 9 is hardcoded in many places. What do people think about a make variable that is GZIP_LEVEL or some such, defaulting to 9, but which can be set to some other value, with the intent that all places in the build system that gzip things use it? (I'm explicitly avoiding that "what is the right level" argument.)
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