<div dir="ltr">On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 5:21 PM, Ryan Schmidt <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ryandesign@macports.org" target="_blank">ryandesign@macports.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><span class=""><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><span><br></span><span>> - use xz instead of bzip2 to compact things a bit more<br>
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</span>Whatever compression format is used needs to be supported without the use of any port. OS X does not include support for dealing with xz files, which is one reason why bz2 files were chosen instead. Changing this would involve bundling a copy of the xz utilities with MacPorts; changing the default archive format from bz2 to xz in archive_sites.conf and macports.conf; re-building all ports on all buildbot builders with this new version of MacPorts; and upgrading all users to this new version of MacPorts. I also do not know what would happen if a user who already has ports installed with bz2 archives suddenly changes the archive format to xz (or, more generally, makes any change to the archive format). Would MacPorts still know how to find the existing archive and remove it when a port is uninstalled or upgraded?</blockquote><div><br></div></span><div>FWIW; running (xz -9) over the .tbz2 files (well, running them through bzip2 -d first) showed that using xz could shave 40% off the storage requirements for the archives.</div><div><br></div><div>I have a range of items installed, but by far the largest (and the ones with some of the largest improvements were clang-3.5 (50% reduction) llvm-3.5 (49% reduction) and gcc48 and 49 (both ~50% the tbz2 size; only saved 20% with "xz" (no -9)).</div><div><br></div><div>qt4-mac showed only a 15% reduction, so there is certainly a range. Text-heavy items are likely to do the best (if I recall...)</div><div><br></div><div>I don't think adding code to look for <pkg_name>.(xz|tbz2) (or even trying to fetch both) is a crazy idea. This wouldn't require rebuilding all of the existing packages, either. Yes, it would require adding xz to the list of "shipped with" items." Thankfully, it only takes about 20s to configure and build (on my machine) and the resulting files are only about 1M.</div><div><br></div><div>Just putting some actual numbers out there for what xz brings to the table.</div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><div><br></div><div> - Eric</div></font></span></div></div></div>
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