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Re: Reason for gz over bz2?



On Sunday 03 June 2007, Frédéric Lopez wrote:
> Eduardo Alberto Hernández Muñoz a écrit :
> >> So is there a reason why more people don't use bzip2 instead of gzip?
> >
> > I'm not sure of how big the difference is, but I'm pretty sure gzip is
> > faster at compressing and decompressing. And since bzip2 making
> > smaller files lowers the download speed, but it's actually slower to
> > decompress, a fast connection used with a slow computer could favor
> > using gzip over bzip2.
>
> For games though, using Loki installer or Mojo makes more sense.

Installers are a two-edged sword, though: I've seen installers error out with 
strange messages even though the actual program they tried to  install would 
run perfectly fine on that machine. It really is difficult to create and 
distribute software that runs on all kinds of Linux distributions out of the 
box.

But back on topic: I can't think of a technical reason for not using bzip2 
over gzip. And to newer versions of GNU tar it doesn't even matter if you 
pass it a uncompressed tar file, a gzip compressed one or a bzip2 compressed 
one. The parameters xf are enough and tar will detect for itself if the file 
has been compressed and decompress it transparently.

Regards,
Gregor

-- 
Moonlight|3D modeller - http://www.moonlight3d.eu

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