Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: results of mercurial user survey

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sun, Apr 30, 2006 at 07:58:14PM -0700, Graydon Hoare wrote:
>   - Mixing a streaming interface with pipelined and multiplexed i/o 
> might not be quite as easy as you like. In particular: you might find 
> that you have to add some logic for flushing gzip's state down at the 
> bottom of the probe loop if the sending side has gone dead (and this 
> might possibly introduce bubbles into the pipeline).

Or you can just hit the flush button after every packet, since we
always consume and generate full packets at a time.  I _think_ that
just flushes any partial byte in the encoder, and thus adds very
little space overhead.

> Those points aside, I certainly wouldn't *stop* anyone from trying it. I 
> just didn't want to deal with such issues when I first wrote it, so I 
> didn't bother.
> 
> >lapo> BTW: what about bzip2?
> >
> >Does it come with a nice API similar to zlib?
> 
> You don't want to use bzip2 for this. It'll chew too much CPU and 
> intermediate storage to make it worth any compression gain.

Plus it's totally non-streamable :-).  You'd basically end up doing
exactly what we do now, since bzip2 operates on blocks (hence the
"b")...

-- Nathaniel

-- 
So let us espouse a less contested notion of truth and falsehood, even
if it is philosophically debatable (if we listen to philosophers, we
must debate everything, and there would be no end to the discussion).
  -- Serendipities, Umberto Eco