OpenMandriva Is The Latest Linux Distribution Using Zstd To Compress Packages

[phoronix]

Phoronix: OpenMandriva Is The Latest Linux Distribution Using Zstd To Compress Packages

Similar to Fedora's move last year to compress RPMs with Zstd rather than XZ for much faster decompression speeds and a better compression ratio at the highest level, OpenMandriva has now enacted a similar change...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenMandriva-Zstd-RPMs

[xpris]

Nice move. Every package should be smaller and decompress much faster. Very good

[uid313]

If Fedora does it, then I guess eventually it will trickle down to Red Hat.

I wonder if Debian and Gentoo are considering Zstd.

[S.Pam]

I guess that Gentoo uses whatever upstream uses to compress their sources.

You can otherwise specify to use pbuzip to uncompress source files.

  PORTAGE_COMPRESS="lzip"
  PORTAGE_COMPRESS_FLAGS="-9"
  PORTAGE_BZIP2_COMMAND="pbzip2"
  PORTAGE_BUNZIP2_COMMAND="pbunzip2"
  BINPKG_COMPRESS="lzip"
  BINPKG_COMPRESS_FLAGS="-9"

[willbprog177]

Hope OpenMandriva's website starts working again soon. It's been 'off the air' for a few days at least. I don't do Facebook, so...

[Paradigm Shifter]

Hope OpenMandriva's website starts working again soon. It's been 'off the air' for a few days at least. I don't do Facebook, so...

Same. I block Facebook at the network level as best I can. I can appreciate some of the work that their devs have made public, but I have no wish whatsoever to interact with the commercial entity.

...

zstandard is one of the things to come out of Facebook devs that I am really impressed with; even if I wished it would handle compression in such a way I don't have to tar everything up before zst'ing it, or do each file individually. I'll admit it's been a while since I pulled it down, so that may have been added, however.

[gyscos]

I wished it would handle compression in such a way I don't have to tar everything up before zst'ing it, or do each file individually. I'll admit it's been a while since I pulled it down, so that may have been added, however.

zstd is just a compression format, like gzip or xz, it still only processes one stream at a time. You still need an archive format like tar to handle multiple files and their metadata (filenames, owners/permissions, ...).

Tar usually puts the archive _under_ the compression (which means multiple similar files compress well). 7-zip puts the archive _over_ the compression (which means that files can be decompressed separately, or potentially even use different compression algorithms) - there's a patched version that supports zstd: https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

Note that you might also make a tar archive of compressed files, but that's less common.

[berolinux]

Hope OpenMandriva's website starts working again soon. It's been 'off the air' for a few days at least. I don't do Facebook, so...

The hoster seems to have messed up routing pretty badly - if they don't fix it really soon now, we'll switch to another. Shouldn't take much longer...
Fakebook is pure evil, zstd is the only good thing that has ever come out of them.

[Paradigm Shifter]

Quick further comment about Zstd: for the data I'm interested in compressing I've just finished a load of comparisons... in a turn I really didn't expect, 7z (LZMA2) is actually more efficient than Zstd, regardless of compression level... in terms of time taken, they're about the same. But LZMA2 creates reliably smaller archives.