RFC#9 - distfiles

[Ed White <ed@overminder.com>]

Request to define bzip2 as preferred distfiles format.

Today every port mantainer choose a format among what is possible. Most times 
this choice is gzip even if bzip2 is available.

Bzip2 could let OpenBSD mirrors save a lot of Mbytes of disk storage and 
bandwidth.
Also fetching users will need less time. Time is precious for anyone...

I'm asking port coordinators to publically define a preferred order of 
distfiles formats.
This is the order I'll suggest:
1) bzip2
2) gzip
3) zip
4) ...

Some interesting examples:
PHP 4.3.1 (tar.bz2) 3,596Kb (tar.gz) 4,395Kb
GTK+ 2.2.1 (tar.bz2) 6.2MB (tar.gz) 8.9MB
OpenOffice 1.0.2 (bzip2) 154MB (gzip) 172MB


        Ed


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