Thoughts on switching our archive compression method

[Dan Ports]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2020 at 08:28:19PM +0200, Vincent Habchi wrote:
> I agree wholeheartedly, but since you mention modern compression algorithms, isn’t there another one (or more) which would be yet more efficient than xz?

In terms of compressed file size, I'm not sure anything is going to
beat xz by much if at all.

If we are going to consider other compression algorithms, zstd would be
the main one to think about, and the main benefit would be much faster
decompression speed in exchange for slightly larger packages than xz.
Some data:
 - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Switch_RPMs_to_zstd_compression#Comparison_of_compression_algorithms_and_levels
 - https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2019-March/029520.html

Whether that's worth bunding a new utility, I'm not sure -- I don't
know what fraction of our package installation time is decompression
right now.

Also, bz2 is particularly slow at decompression, so even xz is likely
an improvement there.

Dan

-- 
Dan R. K. Ports                                      https://drkp.net/