Recompressing knits

[Matthieu Moy]

Hi,

Just a remark which might allow a gain of a few percents in
performances.

Today, bzr's knit format is a concatenation of gziped hunks. It has
many advantages (in particular, the famous "append-only property"),
but it's not as efficient as a globally zipped file.

For example, on the knit file for builtins.py, I get this:

$ wc -c builtins.py-20050830033751-fc01482b9ca23183.knit recompressed.gz 
1566727 builtins.py-20050830033751-fc01482b9ca23183.knit
1363079 recompressed.gz

where recompressed.gz is the result of gunzip+gzip on the knit file.

It might be good to have a command like "bzr optimize-repository"
which could (optionnaly) be ran from time to time (cron job for
example), to do this "gunzip+gzip" operation.

-- 
Matthieu