Bug 372653

Summary:	Enable xz compression by default in portage
Product:	Gentoo Linux	Reporter:	kfm
Component:	[OLD] Unspecified	Assignee:	Portage team <dev-portage>
Status:	RESOLVED INVALID
Severity:	enhancement	CC:	bircoph, pacho
Priority:	Normal
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
See Also:	https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=169260
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---
Bug Depends on:
Bug Blocks:	380925

Description kfm 2011-06-23 02:51:42 UTC

Rationale is as follows:

* A stable version of xz-utils has been in the tree for a while and there
  are no bugs against it

* xz compression is more effective than bzip2

* xz decompression is considerably faster than bzip2

Therefore, I think these would make for better defaults:

  PORTAGE_COMPRESS="xz"
  PORTAGE_COMPRESS_FLAGS="-6"

Similarly, I think that lzma should be a pkginternal default for the current stable version of sys-apps/man:

  IUSE="+lzma nls"

... or for >=sys-apps/man-1.6f-r5 to be marked stable, because the change has already been made there (which, indirectly, could be taken as an endorsement of my suggestion).

Comment 1 SpanKY gentoo-dev

2011-06-23 16:07:48 UTC

the compression is not more effective with smaller files

there was an older bug very similar to this, but i dont remember what it was

Comment 2 kfm 2011-06-23 20:42:07 UTC

I couldn't find the bug in question so maybe it was closed. But, yeah, you're right. I tried it out with the /usr/share/{doc,man} directories from a recent stage3 tarball and using xz slightly increased the footprint, which is disappointing. So, it's good for tarballs and large files only. That'll teach me for not checking the stats. Closing.

Comment 3 SpanKY gentoo-dev

2011-06-23 23:44:09 UTC

np.  i made the same mistake :P.