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Date:      Sun, 23 Jan 2000 10:26:48 +0100 (CET)
From:      Oliver Fromme <olli@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de>
To:        freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: bzip2 in src tree (Was Re: ports/16252: bsd.port.mk: Add bzip2  support for distribution patches)
Message-ID:  <200001230926.KAA81850@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de>
In-Reply-To: <86duop$2n8d$1@atlantis.rz.tu-clausthal.de>

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Garrett Wollman <wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> wrote in list.freebsd-current:
 > If I may inject some possibly-irrelevant fact into this
 > discussion... gzip (or rather, the ``deflate'' compression algorithm
 > and the libz file format) has been adopted into a number of formal
 > standards.  It's likely that it will remain with us for a long time.
 > For those of us who eschew bloatware, it continues to be entirely
 > adequate.

I don't like bzip2 for the sole fact that it takes _ages_ to
compress files, compared to gzip.  Saving 10% or 20% on disk
space is not worth wasting >= 10 times more CPU time than gzip.
Disk space is cheap nowadays, but upgrading to a CPU that is
10 times faster is not.

(I once tried to compress our FreeBSD ISO images with bzip2,
just to compare the space savings with gzip.  I aborted the
experiment after 6 hours (!).  gzip took about 30 minutes.
Consequently, bzip2 was considered unusable and went into the
trash can.)

I'd vote for keeping things as they are:  bzip2 is fine as
a port.

Regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme, Leibnizstr. 18/61, 38678 Clausthal, Germany
(Info: finger userinfo:olli@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de)

"In jedem Stück Kohle wartet ein Diamant auf seine Geburt"
                                         (Terry Pratchett)


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