Re: GerH source distro at hebbut.net: HOW TO compile/compare/merge for Bill et al

On Tue, Apr 01, 2008 at 11:28:02AM -0400, Bill Y wrote:
> 
> 2: Why use 7-zip?  It's just another dependency we're adding
> when it doesn't need to be added.  (unlike the "dependency" on 
> TRE, which is there so we can have NULL-safe strings.)
> 
> In terms of installing software, less really is more.
> 
> Even if you're downloading over a dialup line, and assuming 7z is
> third more compressed as gzip (450Kbytes instead of the 600Kbyte
> gzball) that's only a small difference... more precisely, on the worst
> DSL line it's six seconds difference, and on a 56kbit dialup, it's 21
> seconds difference.
> 
> The time to just _find_ and _install_ 7za is more than that 21 seconds.
> 
> Therefore, don't do it.

no, do it; but maybe provide gz/bz2/zip -ball as well: for the uploader it's
little effort, but for download it does make a difference if people use the 
smallest one, so keep on pushing & hinting for that.

Your POV is limited to just one download by yourself. But consider many, or 
frequent checkout/commit/updates via eg cvs, it'd make a significant 
difference if 'cvs -z' used LZMA instead of {in,de}flate, even for the
single lonely contributor out there.
But it'd make a *big* difference for servers and the whole 'net : consider
all the repos around - kernel.org, debian.org, sf.net etc, cut by (at least)
1/3d the overall disk space + bw consumtion, and you get quite big numbers.

Moreover, again server-side, consider space+bw quotas: .7z allows for +30..50%
more service @same price. You'd be even more happy with .7z if you were
serving files from your very [A]DSL line.

WRT dependencies, consider *sed(1), *awk(1), lua(1), perl(1), ...(1) versus
crm(1) - I'm finding myself mixing bash+sed+awk+crm scripting within same
task according to needs and - well - mood (sed programming is kinda AT modem
programming ...), so one day some distro's pkgrs may find it convenient to
do app post-install setup with crm instead of sed, hence putting a 
dependency on crm. 7zip is such other tool, that happens to do better than
others on some figure (most efficient, but not the fastest).
Some(most?) of the times it's a matter of choice/taste, but sometimes it's
(also) a matter of overall performance of new vs 'standard' - consider again
docs in DjVu vs PDF.

So if it were for me, go for .7z as primary choice, but provide fallback 
(and tweak httpd to save bw on other formats, to discourage the lazy out 
there ;) ). 

my 0.013 EUR

-- 
paolo

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