Re: lzip support

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Fri, 28 Nov 2008, Jan Engelhardt wrote:

> On Friday 2008-11-28 19:38, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> > On Fri, 28 Nov 2008, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> >
> > It was my impression that Automake adopted LZMA utils without fully
> > evaluating the impact. My own package is now distributing .lzma
> > packages.
>
> It's only great until something better comes up :)

In this case, better means a single author and much less source code. 
But it does not currently seem to mean faster:

freddy:~% ls -l GraphicsMagick-1.3.tar
-r--r--r--   1 bfriesen home     36925440 Nov  9 14:54 GraphicsMagick-1.3.tar
freddy:~% ptime lzip -9 GraphicsMagick-1.3.tar

real     1:19.836
user     1:19.347
sys         0.327
freddy:~% ptime lzip -d GraphicsMagick-1.3.tar.lz

real        0.882
user        0.818
sys         0.061
freddy:~% ptime lzma -9 GraphicsMagick-1.3.tar

real       55.439
user       54.630
sys         0.640
freddy:~% ptime lzma -d GraphicsMagick-1.3.tar.lzma

real        0.688
user        0.622
sys         0.064
freddy:~% ptime gzip -9 GraphicsMagick-1.3.tar

real        2.970
user        2.924
sys         0.039
freddy:~% ptime gzip -d GraphicsMagick-1.3.tar.gz

real        0.265
user        0.223
sys         0.040
freddy:~% size /usr/local/bin/lzma
116956 + 8820 + 5748 = 131524
freddy:~% size /usr/local/bin/lzip
80304 + 4689 + 4307 = 89300

Compressed file sizes are quite similar.

> > If an archive format was ever offered before, the feeling is that
> > it must continue to be offered for the rest of time.
>
> *sigh* well, everybody is entitled to do his own liking and
> if that's providing all formats just because.

Currently Automake does not seem to allow disabling gzip support.  It 
makes sense to me that periodically Automake maintainers make an 
evaluation (and with the blessing of the FSF) intentionally deprecate 
generation of certain archive types as new archive types are added. 
The intention would be to diminish the number of archive types, which 
needlessly clog disk space and consume developer time.

Initially there would be a warning, and after a couple of years, the 
less desired archive type would be removed entirely.  At the moment I 
think that it is more desirable for bzip2 to be deprecated than gzip 
since the compression advantage of bzip2 is not that high and it takes 
much more CPU and memory. Zip is quite wasteful, but is perhaps most 
useful for Windows since it does not require 'tar' and there is native 
support in Windows.  It should only be necessary to support one LZMA 
format.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/