emergency file server cleanup

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> AFAICT, deblob-main passes -9 to bzip2, xz and lzip.  I don't mean to be
> doing anything disfavorable to lzip; quite the opposite.  Am I?

Of course not.


> Isn't setting lzip's -9 to lower limits than xz sort of self-defeating?

One man's feature is another man's bug. :-)

It is xz the one that changed -9 to higher limits, and I think it is not 
a good idea for lzip to follow an arms race that could end with both 
lzip and xz requiring 4 GiB of RAM to decompress any file.

A general-purpose compressor must take into account the needs of all its 
users, not only the wishes of some users compressing large tarballs.

Xz is unusable on most small or old hardware. Even the 32 MiB required 
to decompress some lzip files is too much for some machines (VAX). This 
is why lunzip provides a "low memory" mode able to decompress any file 
using as little memory as 50 kB, irrespective of the dictionary size 
used to compress the file.

And you can always pass '-9s64MiB' to lzip if you feel that the extra 
compression is worth the extra memory required.


>>Be the change you wish to see in the world. Drop xz tarballs altogether. ;-)
> 
> That's sort of tempting, since xz takes the longest to compress among
> the 3 compression formats I use, but I'm not sure I'm ready to undertake
> such a bold step ;-)

Have the courage to take your own thoughts seriously, for they will 
shape you. -- Albert Einstein ;-)


Best regards,
Antonio.