Compressing packages with bzip2 instead gzip?

[Michael Vogt]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2006 at 12:14:36PM +0000, Paul Sladen wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Jan 2006, Phillip Susi wrote:
> > Which is why we want to use 7zip, since it is twice as fast at 
> > decompressing as bzip2, and gets better compression. 
[..]
> Delta-debs on Mirrors.
> 
> For mirror distribution, my conclusion from 12months ago was that zsync
> (pre-computed, client-size executed rsync) against the data.tar regenerated
> by dpkg-repack is the way to go.
> 
> Since this would go into APT, dpkg stays clean and 

Using dpkg-repack scares me a bit TBH. Other than that, I like the
zync idea a lot. The only problem is that zsync needs to be told how
to deal with the data.tar and that we need a way to either recontruct
the same md5 sum of the zsynced deb or a different way to check the
authentication of the package. Writing a apt method to zsync stuff
shouldn't be that complicated then.

> I think a *top* priority should be delta-diffs on the Package lists, but the
> dapper-does-it-48-times-a-day churn on these is massive.

We can do that today in apt with the
michael.vogt at ubuntu.com--2005/apt--pdiff--0 branch, it just requires
the server to publish a suitable Index and patches like on
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/main/binary-i386/Packages.diff/ 

Cheers,
 Michael

-- 
Linux is not The Answer. Yes is the answer. Linux is The Question. - Neo