bzip2 and gzip internals (was: Compressing packages with bzip2 instead gzip?)

[Paul Sladen]

On Thu, 19 Jan 2006, John C. McCabe-Dansted wrote:
> On Thursday 19 January 2006 06:04, Phillip Susi wrote:
> > > Zsync can be taught that restart points occur every 900kB,
> > The data stream DOESN'T restart every 900 KB,

The advantage of Free Software is that you get the source code...

> > That's what gzip --rsyncable does,

"--rsync" resets the gzip stream everytime the rolling checksum equals zero,
as such it is not a fixed period.

> with a block compressor there would most likely be changes in every
> block, meaning that zsync would have to download every block.

Meaning that zsync would only have to download *the complete block* covering
anything that it has not found locally.

	-Paul

Mmm, should we take this off-list?
-- 
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