[Debian-med-packaging] Question about proper archive area for packages that require big data for operation

[Benjamin Drung]

Am Dienstag, den 23.04.2013, 13:51 +0200 schrieb Laszlo Kajan:
> Hello Andreas!
> 
> On 23/04/13 12:23, Andreas Tille wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 11:48:05AM +0200, Laszlo Kajan wrote:
> >>
> >> This email is to continue the discussion about free packages that
> >> depend on big (e.g. >400MB) free data outside 'main'.
> > 
> > In your practical case is this data say <500MB?  Are we talking about
> > compressed or uncompressed data (= >400MB on users harddisk or on all
> > Debian mirrors world-wide)?
> 
> It is around 404MB, gzip compressed [1]. I think it is not arch
> independent. I think BLAST databases (the main bulk in the tar.gz) are
> sensitive
> to the size of int, and endian-ness.
> 
> [1] ftp://rostlab.org/metastudent/metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar.gz

You can use xz for the source and binary package to reduce the size. The
default compression level for xz reduces the size of the source tarball
from 415 MB to 272 MB:

$ ls -1s --si metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar*
823M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar
381M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar.bz2
415M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar.gz
272M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar.xz
$ ls -1sh metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar*
784M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar
363M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar.bz2
396M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar.gz
259M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar.xz

-- 
Benjamin Drung
Debian & Ubuntu Developer