Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: patch-log sizes

[Tupshin Harper]

Miles Bader wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 09:41:11AM -0500, Aaron Bentley wrote:
>  
>
> > On Tue, 2003-12-16 at 19:04, Miles Bader wrote:
> >    
> >
> > > Would it be practical to allow some sort of compacted patch-log storage
> > > for sets of old patch-logs, e.g., a .tar.gz file, managed via explicit
> > > user commands?
> > >      
> > For your purposes, it might be an advantage to *not* compress the tar
> > files.  Your primary reason for using tars is to represent several small
> > files as one larger file, which an uncompressed tar can do.
> >    
>
> No, the compression is quite important too.  On ASCII text gzip can reduce
> the size of files dramatically (especially on regular text with lots of
> keywords like patch-logs), and as asuffield has pointed out, the size of the
> patch-log text itself is a problem, not merely the file-system overhead.
>  
This reminds me of a question that I've been meaning to ask for some 
time. Is there a strong reason why it makes sense for arch to store 
files in compressed tars as opposed to storing compressed files in 
uncompressed tars? Specifically, the difference between a .tgz 
containing many .txt files vs a .tar containg many .txt.gz files. 
(Extensions used just to illustrate the fundamental nature of the files 
in question). Presumably compression ratios would be somewhat less, but 
accessing a limited subset of the files in the tar would be *much* cheaper.

Any thoughts? What am I missing?

-Tupshin