[Xapian-devel] Tarball size (was Re: [Xapian-commits] 7916: trunk/xapian-core/ trunk/xapian-core/docs/)

[Olly Betts]

On Thu, Mar 08, 2007 at 05:29:55AM +0000, Olly Betts wrote:
> If I take a xapian-core snapshot (new or old) and just un-tar and re-tar
> the *same* files, it roughly halves in size.  It doesn't look like "make
> dist" does anything stupid, and if I reproduce the options it seems to
> be using, I still get similar reductions in size.

Replying to an old message, but I've just found the explanation - by
default automake generates rules to build tar-v7 format archives.  If
you use tar-ustar instead then you get much smaller archives.

We now need tar-ustar anyway as there are a few filename > 100
characters long.  The automake documentation says it should be almost
universally supported now, and Solaris 9's tar supports them, which
is a good sign.  If anyone is unable to unpack them with their native
tar, they can download GNU tar with less bandwidth than they saved
downloading the smaller xapian-core tarball!

Cheers,
    Olly