[Rpm-metadata] adding different compression types to createrepo

[Robert Xu]

I can't resist these talks anymore. time for me to give my... 2 cents.

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 11:01, Matthew Dawkins <mattydaw at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Double in size? Not sure where you get double in size from.
>>
>> for primary it seems to be about 30% larger - which is one of the things
>> we want to address by changing the format of all of it.

I still don't like the fact that we can't just have simple xml files.
xml isn't obsolete.

>>
>
> This is just one of my results:
> 668     ./filelists.sqlite.bz2
> 536     ./filelists.xml.gz
> 128     ./other.sqlite.bz2
> 92      ./other.xml.gz
> 472     ./primary.sqlite.bz2
> 212     ./primary.xml.gz
> 4       ./repomd.xml
>
>> for filelists the sqlite is smaller by almost half.
>> for other/changelog the sqlite is 12% larger.
>>
>
> You can see primary is_NOT 30% larger but more like 120% larger.  Although
> filelists is only around 25% larger. So...?

It doesn't help for people with slow internet connections; downloading
such large files could take an eternity.

>
>>
>> I'm not terribly interested in accepting that patch upstream. It'll just
>> be breaking compat for lots and lots of tools and breaking compat w/o
>> making other beneficial changes to the format of things is unwise.
>>
>> It means we'll have repos masquerading as compatible which are not.
>>
>
> If the patch is done right it can give each individual user their desired
> results. It would be easy to add a switch to the command like the opensuse
> patch does. ie
>
> createrepo --lzma\xz\bz2\gz
>
> and leave the default as gz for xml files and bz2 for sqlite files. That way
> nothing changes for the normal default usage, but if one would like to
> enhance their compression of the xml or sqlite files, that would be their
> choice to add the extra switch. I don't understand why that gets confused
> with trying to masquerade and being compatible?
>
>

I like this. Let createrepo get its "option" switch and let the
distributions figure out themselves.
Don't change this just because one distribution wants to.

Just my few cents.


-- 
later, Robert Xu