Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2011 11:06:43 -0400 From: Daniel Staal <DStaal@usa.net> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: where to ask about problems with bsdinstall in 9.0RC2? Message-ID: <788196A576272A9B463EE70B@mac-pro.magehandbook.com> In-Reply-To: <4EC76580.7060204@infracaninophile.co.uk> References: <20111118230001.GJ8967@itcom245.staff.itd.umich.edu> <4EC6FE1A.2040207@gmail.com> <4EC76580.7060204@infracaninophile.co.uk>
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--As of November 19, 2011 8:14:56 AM +0000, Matthew Seaman is alleged to have said: > On 19/11/2011 00:53, Edward Martinez wrote: >> As the progress bar moved to the right toward 100% completion, a >> window popped up telling me that it (bsdinstall) could not handle >> the base.txz (BTW, what does the suffix ".txz" mean?) - it could >> not uncompress it and said something about "unable to write" and >> the string was something like: "var/base.txz" (note the lack of >> a leading slash in front of "var"). > > xz(1) is the latest compression program around. It usually gets better > results than bzip2 so lots of usages are being switched to it. .txz is > a tar archive compressed with xz. --As for the rest, it is mine. Just as a quick digression... xz has only marginal improvements in compressed size over bzip2, and takes a lot more cpu/memory resources to compress. In most cases, I'd say it's the wrong choice for a compression format. However, the one place where it is unequivocally the *best* choice is one that will make it well known: Distributing archives. It does beat bzip2 by a small amount, and it's *decompression* time is *much* faster than bzip2 - on par with gzip. Plus decompression can be done in a fixed amount of RAM, regardless of the size of the files being uncompressed. For files that are compressed once and then decompressed many times on many different boxes - like a FreeBSD release - it's a definite win. But for files that will be compressed and uncompressed regularly, or compressed and usually never touched again, it's worth thinking about what's the best balance of resources. Daniel T. Staal --------------------------------------------------------------- This email copyright the author. Unless otherwise noted, you are expressly allowed to retransmit, quote, or otherwise use the contents for non-commercial purposes. This copyright will expire 5 years after the author's death, or in 30 years, whichever is longer, unless such a period is in excess of local copyright law. ---------------------------------------------------------------
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