Re: 7-Zip / Bzip2

["Samuel J. Greear" <dragonflybsd@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Matthew Dillon" <dillon@apollo.backplane.com> wrote in message 
200805060047.m460lrhj094676@apollo.backplane.com">news:200805060047.m460lrhj094676@apollo.backplane.com...
> :Hi,
> :
> :Posted this to kernel@ by accident, please reply here instead :)
> :
> :I just wanted to know if there's any interest for the devs to add
> :something like p7zip to the base install; even if it's a simple fork
> :that only supports 7z.  While 7zip is about as obnoxiously slow as
> :bzip2, it usually gets much better compression.
> :
> :That's not why I'm suggesting it though - what really gets me is that
> :bzip2 has no "list" option.  Does that 10 gb bzip2 backup archive
> :contain 100gb of data, or 200gb?  Other than dumping the entire
> :archive to /dev/null through wc, there's really no way to do it.  Gzip
> :will list files, but its compression ratio is awful.
> :
> :I imagine that other OSes are going to be watching Dragonfly very
> :carefully in the next while as new the features (especially HAMMER)
> :mature.  Maybe adding 7z will get yet another bandwagon going and
> :there will be support across the board :)
> :
> :Best Regards,
> :Ben Cadieux
>
>    Well, I think not in base, at least not unless a lot of people
>    are using it.  p7zip is readily available via the pkgsrc tree
>    and that's the most reasonable method of accessibility for
>    now.
>
> -Matt
> Matthew Dillon
> <dillon@backplane.com>

I do not know if DragonFly is actively tracking libarchive, but it seems
to be "the ticket" for implementing new archiving/compression methods
through a common mechanism. If one wanted to see 7z functionality
in base implementing a libarchive provider is probably the way to go.

I did a quick test at one point on the dfly distribution ISO and as I
recall 7z was ~60% the size of bzip2 using standard settings.
food+thought, etc.

Sam