to LZMA or not to LZMA

[Harald Sitter]

On Mittwoch, 27. Mai 2009 04:12:03 Vishal Rao wrote:
> On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 2:50 AM, Harald Sitter 
<apachelogger at ubuntu.com>wrote:
> > You might also want to read http://tukaani.org/lzma/benchmarks
>
> If I'm reading the numbers (binary data) on that page correctly, does it
> suggest that
> if current Kubuntu desktop CD/ISO is about ~700 mb then moving to lzma will
> shrink
> it down to ~600mb thus allowing for an *extra* ~100mb of compressed stuff?!
>
> If approximately so, then it's what they call a "no brainer" I would think
>
> :-)

Well, not that much. I didn't look into it but logic suggests that the 
squashfs we use on the CD is using a LZMA compression (since that obviously 
shrinks the ISO a lot ;-)). If so, the win wouldn't be as big but still of 
considerable amount. Even if we only get 10 MiB out of the compression change, 
this still would mean about 2 half decent applications more on the CD. Or one 
more translation package.

Also, one important fact I forgot to mention in my original mail is that this 
also decreases the time/download volume everyone has to spend on KDE packages, 
which is a quite important advantage considering the fact that a stable 
release update to fix a bug in konqueror will also trigger an update of the 
dolphin binary (since they have the same source package). So, decreasing the 
sizes would make that less painful.