[Pkg-fonts-devel] Possible abuse of dpkg-deb -z9 for xz compressed binary packages

[Changwoo Ryu]

2014-09-03 3:42 GMT+09:00 Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <sebastian at breakpoint.cc>:
> On 2014-09-02 14:08:57 [+0900], Changwoo Ryu wrote:
>> "dh_builddeb -- -Zxz -Sextreme -z9" has been introduced to the
>> pkg-font team when dpkg-deb default is not xz.
>>
>> In my quick experiments with some font packages, "-Sextream -z9"
>> option still gives  ~4% smaller size than the default. IMO this is
>> still significant for big font packages.
>
> I've been looking at the fonts packages and none of them is >= 64MiB. I
> may missed one. The largest I've found is fonts-droid with 15MiB. The
> option -7 uses 16MiB of dictionary and should cover everything.
> Repacking it with 0…9 +-e gives
...
> For this particular case the default setting (-6) produce "only" a 4.5 KiB
> larger archive compared to -9e.

There are bigger fonts:

For fonts-nanum, the default is ~300 KiB 3.5% larger than -9e. And -9e
is not better than -8e.

25712640 data.tar
9015024 data.tar.xz.6
9012176 data.tar.xz.6.e
8867640 data.tar.xz.7.e
8707900 data.tar.xz.8.e
8707900 data.tar.xz.9.e

For fonts-nanum-eco, ~469 KiB 3.4% larger. -8e/-9e difference is only 4k.

57876480 data.tar
14499660 data.tar.6
14366496 data.tar.6.e
14244460 data.tar.7.e
14023408 data.tar.8.e
14019644 data.tar.9.e

-8e seems to be better choice than -9e in these cases.