[fpc-pascal] a suggestion...

[Flávio Etrusco]

On 5/24/06, Пётр Косаревский с mail.ru <ppkk at mail.ru> wrote:
> FK> Jonas Maebe wrote:
> >> On 24 mei 2006, at 17:30, Florian Klaempfl wrote:
> >>
> >>> Not really because it is simply a tar ball of several .tar.gz. Because
> >>> gzip is spread wider, we use this instead of bzip2/7zip.
> >> Isn't bzip2 available more or less everywhere nowadays? (at least where
> >> gzip is available, and in particular on Linux?)
> FK> At least on debian woody it wasn't installed by default. No idea about
> FK> sarge.

AFAIR it is even used for .debs. Does priority "important" makes it
installed by default?

http://packages.qa.debian.org/b/bzip2.html
http://packages.debian.org/stable/utils/bzip2

> Just wondering: is RAR considered "spread wide"?
>

I would say definetely _no_.

> I know that compressor is commercial, but uncompressor is not (sources
> are available, if I remember right), and it

The open source version only supports old formats, the newest
format(s?) is only supported by a closed-source (but free as in beer)
version, which must be downloaded separately (even if it only requires
using synaptic...).

> compresses sources better than gzip by 25% (often even more). There
> are better compressors, they are free (sometimes even open source),
> but support matters (dos, windows, pocket pc, linux, free bsd and
> macos x versions are ready to download).

bzip2 has similar compression rates (except maybe for multimedia
files, which isn't the case) and 7zip/LZMA usually compresses better
than RAR.
7zip isn't installed by default in any distro AFAIK, but at least it
open source.

RAR would be my last option...

Cheers,
Flávio