this is partly a catalyst bug, but can we start releasing stage tarballs built with xz instead of bzip2 ? seems to cut down on size by ~30%. in the x32 case, i saw it go from ~182mb to ~122mb. xz-utils should be part of @system now which means it's in release media ...
Informal comparison of compressors using amd64 stage3: 458690560 stage3-amd64-20120621.tar 153890816 stage3-amd64-20120621.tar.gz 137953280 stage3-amd64-20120621.tar.bz2 108445696 stage3-amd64-20120621.squashfs (-comp xz -b 1M) 91889664 stage3-amd64-20120621.tar.xz-6 85053440 stage3-amd64-20120621.tar.xz-7 82546688 stage3-amd64-20120621.tar.xz-8e 81485824 stage3-amd64-20120621.tar.xz-9e 77283328 stage3-amd64-20120621.tar.zpaq-m4
*** Bug 520336 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
any movement here ? what'll it take ? tweak the releng autobuild scripts ?
The new catalyst code now allows choosing the compression method, including xz. We'll likely move to tar.xz stages as soon as there's a catalyst release supporting it.
actually I'd suggest wide use of app-arch/pixz, not just for the stages (i.e. catalyst), also for emerge-webrsync (i.e. the underlying version-control snapshot-system) but not source-packages developed by gentoo-folks (since portage already works in parallell). for the price of a slightly larger file than ordinary *.tar.xz you'd get parallell tar-extraction and save the users some seconds of waiting. but as for this very suggestion: it's good to have a choice to select xz-compressed stuff, but if you happen to be on a system without xz available you cannot use that system for gentoo-installation. that's bad! when bz2 was new a lot of stuff was provided as gz (and maybe Z) in addition to bz2.
We already have a branch in the releng repo to use catalyst-3[1] that uses pixz. [1] - https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/releng.git/log/?h=catalyst3 $ grep -H compression releases/weekly/specs/amd64/stage* releases/weekly/specs/amd64/stage1-nomultilib.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/stage1.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/stage1-x32.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/stage2-nomultilib.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/stage2.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/stage2-x32.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/stage3-nomultilib.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/stage3.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/stage3-x32.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/stage4-cloud.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/stage4-nomultilib-cloud.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x $ grep -H compression releases/weekly/specs/amd64/hardened/stage* releases/weekly/specs/amd64/hardened/stage1-nomultilib.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/hardened/stage1-selinux-nomultilib.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/hardened/stage1-selinux.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/hardened/stage1.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/hardened/stage2-nomultilib.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/hardened/stage2-selinux-nomultilib.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/hardened/stage2-selinux.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/hardened/stage2.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/hardened/stage3-nomultilib.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/hardened/stage3-selinux-nomultilib.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/hardened/stage3-selinux.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/hardened/stage3.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/hardened/stage4-cloud.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/amd64/hardened/stage4-nomultilib-cloud.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x $ grep -H compression releases/weekly/specs/x86/stage* releases/weekly/specs/x86/stage1.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/x86/stage2.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x releases/weekly/specs/x86/stage3.spec:compression_mode: pixz_x I've been building the xz stages[2] in my server for some months and we're already doing some testing on infra systems with catalyst-3. [2] - https://www.jmbsvicetto.name/releases/auto/
http://distfiles.gentoo.org/releases/amd64/autobuilds/20180109T214501Z/ We finally built tar.xz stages.
