On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 07:53:36PM -0400, Cristian Rodríguez wrote:
Hi:
I would like to propose replacing (not removing) the default command line tools for compression, specifically "gzip" for "pigz" and "bzip2" for pbzip2. These tools are backward compatible and have dramatically better performance because they do compression in parallel utilizing current multiple CPU machines.
Possible paths to do this
a) Simple adding "update-alternatives" support to all the mentioned tools and let the user to decide, however we install pigz and pbzip2 by default. I do not endorse this way.
We already use u-a for /bin/awk or /bin/vim, where it works smoothly, so why not use it for gzip as well? As the version in Factory is written in C, you will no longer need Perl for using your gzip/gunzip. I now that update-alternatives has very bad reputation, but the major problem of really complex system of master/slave symlinks in Java packages (for instance it's very hard to move the slave from one major to an another, as it has to be done in all packages at the same time). Regards Michal Vyskocil