/opt/local/macports/software

[Eric A. Borisch]

On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 5:21 PM, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org>
wrote:

>
> > - use xz instead of bzip2 to compact things a bit more
>
> Whatever compression format is used needs to be supported without the use
> of any port. OS X does not include support for dealing with xz files, which
> is one reason why bz2 files were chosen instead. Changing this would
> involve bundling a copy of the xz utilities with MacPorts; changing the
> default archive format from bz2 to xz in archive_sites.conf and
> macports.conf; re-building all ports on all buildbot builders with this new
> version of MacPorts; and upgrading all users to this new version of
> MacPorts. I also do not know what would happen if a user who already has
> ports installed with bz2 archives suddenly changes the archive format to xz
> (or, more generally, makes any change to the archive format). Would
> MacPorts still know how to find the existing archive and remove it when a
> port is uninstalled or upgraded?


FWIW; running (xz -9) over the .tbz2 files (well, running them through
bzip2 -d first) showed that using xz could shave 40% off the storage
requirements for the archives.

I have a range of items installed, but by far the largest (and the ones
with some of the largest improvements were clang-3.5 (50% reduction)
llvm-3.5 (49% reduction) and gcc48 and 49 (both ~50% the tbz2 size; only
saved 20% with "xz" (no -9)).

qt4-mac showed only a 15% reduction, so there is certainly a range.
Text-heavy items are likely to do the best (if I recall...)

I don't think adding code to look for <pkg_name>.(xz|tbz2) (or even trying
to fetch both) is a crazy idea. This wouldn't require rebuilding all of the
existing packages, either. Yes, it would require adding xz to the list of
"shipped with" items." Thankfully, it only takes about 20s to configure and
build (on my machine) and the resulting files are only about 1M.

Just putting some actual numbers out there for what xz brings to the table.

 - Eric
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