Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Free space wasting when handling binary files

[Matthew Dempsky]

On Fri, 2005-03-25 at 15:04 -0500, Adrian Irving-Beer wrote:
> And if you want to specify different options for gzip?  Or a lower
> compression level for bzip2 based on the size of the files in
> question?  Or a compression program that doesn't use -d?

Don't get me wrong, I understand doing the compression ourselves would
yield extra flexibility, but is there a real use case where someone
might want to do one of those?

> I wasn't saying we *should* do that right now, merely that it isn't
> hard to run them separately.  Despite the current dependency on GNU
> tar, we are not limited to using only the compression methods it
> supports, nor in the exact same way it does, nor waiting until
> everyone's tar has support for some new program, nor adding another
> dependency on the GNU version in the first place.  That's all.

A tertiary benefit of only using features built into GNU tar, however,
is that it's fewer external dependencies for tla to worry about at
config time.  Consequently, archives are more portable because I don't
have to worry about installing foozip to access someone's archive.

-- 
Matthew Dempsky <address@hidden>

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