Re: Better compression for the Windows installer

[Arturo 'Buanzo' Busleiman <buanzo () buanzo com ar>]

On 06/29/2010 10:04 PM, Fyodor wrote:
> That is greater than an 11% reduction in the bz2 size for the 7z.  It
> almost even beat the 10MB mark!  Too bad my "tar" can't deal with
> it.

Excerpt from http://www.mail-archive.com/bug-tar () gnu org/msg00375.html

- - -
On Mon, Oct 31, 2005 at 12:27:44PM +0100, Rene Leonhardt wrote:

| I am wondering if there are any plans to support the LGPL 7-Zip compression
| format besides the already supported compress, gzip and bzip2 formats.

7z isn't very popular (yet?) in the *nix communities, and these are
the people who mostly use tar.  There's not much overlap.

Also, 7z is more like zip or rar, which are an archiver plus a
compresser, where gzip, bzip2 and compress are just stream compressers
-- they compress a single stream.  So it doesn't really make that much
sense to use 7z with tar, because 7z already has the ability to
combine many files into one compressed archive, so tar isn't needed.

(The only thing that tar would really add to the equation is the
ability to better preserve things like permissions, links,
atime/mtime/ctime, etc.)

- - -

The rest of the response is also interesting.

--
Arturo "Buanzo" Busleiman
Independent Linux and Security Consultant - OWASP - SANS - OISSG
http://www.buanzo.com.ar/pro/eng.html
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