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From: | Tupshin Harper |
Subject: | Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: patch-log sizes |
Date: | Wed, 17 Dec 2003 12:22:07 -0800 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031205 Thunderbird/0.4 |
Thomas Zander wrote:
Your post reminded me of what I was missing. I'd forgotten that tar doesn't contain any index into it's contents (unlike zip), and therefore extracting a single file would still require a linear seek through the contents looking for the one file that you want to extract. CPU utilization would go down since you only gunzip one file, but disk access would be the bottleneck, and would be unaffected or be made worse by this strategy. Sigh...tar sucks.-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1This 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?Did you research this; since research on my part (actually by the OpenOffice group) showed that this is not cheaper at all..
-Tupshin
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