Has there been experiments with 7zip for deb packages

[Paul Sladen]

On Tue, 18 Jan 2005, Kristof Vansant wrote:

Hello Kristof,

> Giuseppe from Mdk pointed me at: 7zip [..] which (apparently) gives a
> 20% size reduction on an OO.o source archive over bzip2 -

It's something that probably warrants further investigation;  although I
think people may have been avoiding it because of a patent issue in one of
the algorithms it's using.  (I don't know more details).

I did see references to it in the ''Advanced Compressor'' in the cloop-utils
suite used for building the LiveCD.

One of the reasons 7zip probably doing so well on OOo is because of the
duplication in the XML files across languages being handled by the variable
dictionary size (gzip==32kB, bzip2 == 965kB after block rearranging, 7zip ==
unlimited) allowing it effectively to do the same as I experiemented with
manually:

  http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/HoaryHedgehogOpenOfficeL10nCompression

(I got a 33% ish saving when I last investigated.  However I think haggai
said that OOo2 uses a different setup).  It might be interesting to see what
can be archived with both techniques, but one of the things are the front of
Ubuntu's mind is providing a Free distribution and such a fundamental tool
can probably not be seen to have patent problems in any particular counties.

	-Paul
-- 
Is there no safe way to travel?  London, GB