On Thursday 01 September 2011, Anders Johansson wrote:
To me the most obvious point is that there are lots of scripts out there that call gzip. Command line invocations aren't the big deal. It's not just about "type this instead of that", it's about changing all the scripts. Both gzip and bzip2 are way too slow.
There is not that much to change, for example I just have this on all my machines: /etc/logrotate.conf compresscmd /usr/bin/xz compressoptions -3 uncompresscmd /usr/bin/unxz And no more .bz2 files within /var anymore. I think there are just a few things to do like this https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/71420 or this https://features.opensuse.org/312439 And then bzip2 calls could be completely replaced by "xz -3" (sometimes even xz -6) within system scripts per default.
Both gzip and bzip2 are way too slow. I'm not sure how this new pigz thing measures against xz, but when I tested xz I was very impressed by both speed and compression ratios. We need improvements
Personally I've replaced all my former bzip2 use cases by xz -3/-6 and most (not all) of my gzip use cases by xz -1.
Ideally we should have a "meta compressor", one program with one set of parameters, and a configurable backend, selectable through
Why not just using something like compress/uncompress. (BTW I always wondered why suse doesn't have this posix requirement which would be also the right place where to switch from gzip to pigz.) see the example /usr/bin/uncompress (which comes from gzip rpm) I would do it this way compress+ - use a configurable default compression xz, bzip2 or gzip - use a configurable implementation of above protocols - add an option to switch the compressions at command line (if it's ok to add this option to the posix specification) decompress+ - defines a list of default binaries for each compression protocol - automatically execute the right binary Both scripts should support the common interface of xz, bzip2 and gzip and maybe some more options like "--threads" which are just ignored if the underlying executable doesnt support it. If the script people would start using this, then we could avoid renaming good old executables (BTW I am almost sure that such wrapper scripts are existing already somewhere.) cu, Rudi -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org