Fri May 8 18:49:03 CDT 2009
Hello folks! This batch of updates includes the newly released KDE 4.2.3,
but more noticeably it marks the first departure from the use of gzip for
compressing Slackware packages. Instead, we will be using xz, based on
the LZMA compression algorithm. xz offers better compression than even
bzip2, but still offers good extraction performance (about 3 times better
than bzip2 and not much slower than gzip in our testing). Since support
for bzip2 has long been requested, support for bzip2 and the original lzma
format has also been added (why not?), but this is purely in the interest
of completeness -- we think most people will probably want to use either
the original .tgz or the new .txz compression wrappers. The actual
Slackware package format (which consists of the layout within the package
envelope) has not changed, but this is the first support within Slackware's
package tools for using alternate compression algorithms.
Some people have asked why we don't pick a single extension, such as
.slk. While there's certainly a case to be made for that idea, the tools
would still need to support .tgz to handle older packages. Sticking with
".tgz" for everything makes no sense. Using extensions that reflect the
compression format used by the package envelope seems to be the most
transparent approach, and the one that best follows tradition.
As an example of the compression improvement with .txz, have a look
at the kernel-source package:
Before: kernel-source-2.6.29.2_smp-noarch-1.tgz (73808508 bytes)
After: kernel-source-2.6.29.2_smp-noarch-1.txz (49150104 bytes)
The size of the main package tree in /slackware has been reduced from
1.9GB to 1.4GB by converting most packages to .txz.
Most of the packages have been converted from .tgz to .txz, but we
will continue to make the gzip, pkgtools, slackpkg, tar, and xz packages
in .tgz format for the foreseeable future.
Enjoy! And thanks to Lasse Collin for the great work on xz. :-)
Source:ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-current/ChangeLog.txt
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