downloading a 500kb (uncompressed) Packages file from the binhost over a somewhat slow connection (UMTS in my case) is a PITA, so can we please add compression support to the code handling that file (creation on the binhost and handling on the client)?
How about if you configure your webserver for gzip compression and we add support to portage for that? I found some sample code that we can use here: http://diveintopython.org/http_web_services/gzip_compression.html
Well, that would be a start, but remember that portage also supports FTP for fetching stuff from the binhost... wouldn't it be nice if that compression would be transfer protocol agnostic?
I suppose we can have portage create a Packages.gz and download that one instead of the uncompressed version.
would make more sense to use bzip2 instead, since the packages are compressed with the same algorithm
(In reply to comment #4) > would make more sense to use bzip2 instead, since the packages are compressed > with the same algorithm Shouldn't the algorithm for both (tarballs and Packages) be configurable anyway?! :) Something line PORTAGE_COMPRESS... Could be named PORTAGE_BINHOST_COMPRESS and would need to be specified on both the binhost and the clients in order to use a specific compression method. It could default to gzip though. What do you think?
(In reply to comment #5) > It could default to gzip though. > What do you think? lzma, because it is compress once, decompress many times, IMO. And lzma is a much better compressor too. A configurable compressor would be pretty nice but causes some problems in distribution (think of hosts not having the right decompressor). However, defaulting to gzip sounds unreasonable to me, since Gentoo has been using bzip2 for ages, and it is a better compressor than gzip. And pbzip2 is nice too...:wq
Any news on this one? :) TIA!
There's support for http compression now: http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/portage.git;a=commit;h=cbebf76d8e5666aad4984f87c2be83d474fe5a7e And FEATURES=compress-index to make it generate Packages.gz: http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/portage.git;a=commit;h=11c0619c63b54346ee5c67cd67ab1ccb24f5f947