*.Deb packages : what compression format does it use ??

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 12:18:34PM +0100, Vincent Trouilliez wrote:
> I had a look at Gnome's download page :
> http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/platform/2.10/2.10.0/sources/
> 
> and realised that each and every package it is made of, is available in
> two formats : tar.gz and tar.bz2.
> The .bz2 files are consistently 30% smaller than the .gz files. Or, the
> other way around, .gz files are almost 50% bigger than the  .bz2 files,
> rather impressive !!!
> But Ubuntu can open both files without problems. What is the point of
> using .gz format then ? Is it because Gnome is multi-platform, and some
> of them can't open .bz2 files ?

.debs have historically been .gz, but .bz2 compression has recently been
added. However, it takes longer for slow or memory-starved machines to
decompress .bz2, so we're being cautious about how we use it. Size isn't
everything ...

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]