From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] ideas for a new install procedure
From: geoff@collyer.net
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Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 02:44:53 -0800
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9pc*.gz are compressed with gzip:

; ed - /sys/src/9/pc/mkfile
/gzip/;-,.p
$p$CONF.gz: $p$CONF
	strip < $p$CONF | gzip -9 > $p$CONF.gz

I haven't been impressed with bzip2.  It consumes a lot more cpu time
and doesn't seem to yield correspondingly better compression.  The
comparison I made was compressing the first 1GB of an image of a
heavily-used 4.5 GB disk, using gzip, gzip -9, bzip2 and bzip2 -9.  It
compressed down to about 45% of original size.  -9 never helped much
(maybe 5% at most) and bzip2 consumed about an order of magnitude more
cpu time for very little gain, maybe another 5%.  I like to get my
gigabytes compressed while I'm still young enough to enjoy them, so
I've pretty much given up on bzip2.  If you had to shave a few
kilobytes off a compressed kernel to make the install kit fit on a
floppy, it might be worth using bzip2 -9.