From: Robert Feldt <feldt@...>
Date: 2001-11-01T00:35:37+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:23962] Re: RubyGems Discussion

On Thu, 1 Nov 2001, Ned Konz wrote:

> > Ok, agreed. One bad thing with the last req is that we might loose some
> > opportunities for compression (compressing the whole gem will probably
> > give higher compression than compressing on a fil-by-file basis). I would
> > think that the zip format has a solution to this? (I thought zlib have
> > support for stream-based compression which allows positional access on
> > the compressed stream?)
> 
> I would recommend a format (perhaps Zip) in which each constituent file
> can be compressed or not; otherwise, you have to decompress the whole thing
> to even read the contents. Though for small files that isn't too bad either.
> 
> I wouldn't worry too much about getting the last little bit of compression
> out of the files; there just isn't too much difference in size between a
> typical .tar.gz of small files and a zip file of the same (like 62K for zip
> and 54K for tar.gz for instance).
> 
Thanks for clearing this up; I messed it up! ;-)

If its done on a per-file basis I would again like to propose LZO as in
the CompressionR extension. It should be faster than zlib at
decompression even though slightly worse compression ratio.

Regards,

Robert