[Rpm-maint] [rpm-software-management/rpm] Examine Compressed Headers (Issue #2220)

[Daniel Alley]

IMO this would somewhat devalue the RPM format as opposed to something like Debian or Arch packages, which are something more akin to just storing compressed files within an archive.  

A benefit of RPM is that you don't have to do a lot of processing to get at the metadata, so in theory working with the headers can be more efficient. (However, I actually have no idea how true that is in practice with modern hardware).  If you put all the metadata into one big compressed blob which forces you to pay the cost of decompression before you can access any of the metadata, it feels like you would end up in the worst of both worlds - a complex file format that may not provide any practical benefits.

Semi-random data (like signatures and checksums) is not very compressable, anyway, and it sounds like a lot of the recent upwards pressure on header sizes is coming from this.  There were some estimations done when there was a proposal about adding file IMA signatures to repo metadata:  https://github.com/rpm-software-management/createrepo_c/issues/313#issuecomment-1057223876

File lists OTOH are fairly compressible, so I won't claim the benefit would be zero.

-- 
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm/issues/2220#issuecomment-1349650305
You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.

Message ID: <rpm-software-management/rpm/issues/2220/1349650305 at github.com>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.rpm.org/pipermail/rpm-maint/attachments/20221213/8abb658c/attachment.html>