Compressing packages with bzip2 instead gzip?

[Phillip Susi]

Compression algorithms generally perform better the more data you give 
them, especially 7-zip.  Rather than compress each language pack 
individually, I decided to try compressing them all as one unit.  I 
extracted all of the language packs and tared up and compressed the 
resulting directory tree:

.tar:     184,934,400
.tar.gz:  61,478,589
.tar.bz2: 49,982,949
.tar.7z:  23,081,869


As you can see, 7-zip's compression REALLY improved with the combined 
data set giving a space savings of 54% over the original .debs, and 43% 
over individually 7-zipping each package.  Are all of these language 
packs on the setup/live cds?  If so then compressing them this way would 
free up 27 MB of space.  I wonder what other packages this could be 
applied to?



Mikael Eriksson wrote:
> A repack of language-pack-gnome-* shows that most would be smallest when
> compressed with 7z. And the rest is smallest with gzip -9.
> See the attached file.
> 
>