[Cocci] coccinelle-tests.tgz is *big*; have you considered compressing with xz?

[Julia Lawall]

On Thu, 4 Jun 2009, Jim Meyering wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I've just downloaded coccinelle-tests.tgz, all 240MiB of it.
> That takes a while, even at over 600KB/s.
> 
> You might want to distribute an xz-compressed tarball as well.
> I recompressed with xz (http://tukaani.org/xz/), and got this:
> 
>     $ xz -9ev coccinelle-tests.tar
>     ...
>     $ du -h coccinelle-tests.tar.xz
>     71M
> 
> That's 1/4 the size.
> 
> In case you haven't heard of XZ yet, that's probably
> because it's relatively new.  It's the successor to LZMA,
> which is now deprecated.  If you're wondering whether it
> is mainstream enough, I use it to make upstream coreutils
> releases and automake and GNU tar already support it.
> 
> The only thing to bear in mind is that compression takes longer,
> sometimes substantially longer, but for something that will be
> compressed once and then downloaded many times, it's usually
> well worth it.

Thanks for the pointer.  I will look into it.

julia