Compressing packages with bzip2 instead gzip?

[Florian Zeitz]

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Carlos Ribeiro schrieb:
> On 12/10/05, *Snaury* <snaury at gmail.com <mailto:snaury at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     On 12/10/05, *Carlos Ribeiro* <carribeiro at gmail.com
>     <mailto:carribeiro at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>         That's the real problem - having all language packs inside one
>         single deb would imply that all languages would be installed at
>         once. I don't think that we'll find an easy way around this one.
> 
> 
>     How about creating a special kind of a repository in 7z format for
>     language packs only (or maybe for other packages that need it), that
>     contains uncompressed .debs inside? That way you could propably
>     achieve the same size (because 7-zip uses solid mode by default),
>     and a way to install certain language packs (just install needed
>     ones to a temp directory).
> 
> 
> That's the easy part: a loop mount, the same way ISOs can be mounted,
> but for 7z files. The real problem is that having packages inside
> packages would involve changing the way the packaging system works.
> Currently it just fetches independent files from the repository and
> install them. Having packages inside packages (no matter how cleverly
> you retrieve the sub-packages from inside the others) involve changing a
> lot of stuff. I'm not sure if it's worth the hassle.
> 
> (The best approximation that could be made is that of a compressed
> repository - but again, I don't think that there would be much to gain
> from this approach. I may be wrong of course).
> 

I actually like the idea, having multiple .debs in a 7z archive would
probably compress very well.
If this was used for the language-packs on the install CD it might allow
to put all of them on the CD. This wouldn't be usefull for downloading
packages from the web, because as someone mentioned, nobody will want to
install all langauge-packs.
But I could think of another usecase:
OpenOffice (maybe others as well) consist of multiple packages, which
all have to be installed, OpenOffice uses IIRC a lot of XML data, so if
one compressed all OpenOffice packages in a 7z archive it would probably
shrink considerably. This would be usefull for the people downloading
packages from the internet.

Implementation shouldn't be to hard. Basically there would be an extra
step of loop mounting the 7z package, and after that installing the
.debs from the mountpoing instead of the standard location.
Of course there would have to be a download mechanism for the 7z
packages. It might be easiest to just put the 7z archive containing the
.debs in a .deb itself. The hardest part might actually be knowing which
archive contains which packages. I have no clue how this could be archived.

- ------------------
Florob
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