Compressing packages with bzip2 instead gzip?

[Timo Jyrinki]

> That's only an idea though, as I have no access to the
> central repository to try it myself... (although I could
> possible try the develop some kind of automated repackagind
> robot in my own PC).

About the usage of possible space savings: where is it needed? In my
opinion including all languages' language packs would be the best thing
to have. I think the limit of the CD size hasn't been a factor in what
programs are included on the Ubuntu CDs, but the one thing that is
downloaded from the Internet because of size constraints is the language
files for most of the not-top-20-spoken languages.

The figures for combined language pack files are very promising:
> .tar.gz:  61,478,589
> .tar.bz2: 49,982,949
> .tar.7z:  23,081,869

I think all of the language packs could be included in .tar.7z format
for the size of the current separate bz2 files.

Doing this only for the langpacks would have the benefit of not messing
with the whole archive (something Canonical might not want to do for
Dapper??), but the negative side would be to find a solution to how
language packs would be compressed "as a whole" on the CD and still have
a way to extract separate language pack deb:s.

-Timo