[Slackbuilds-users] txz?

[B. Watson]

On Tue, 6 Oct 2026, Yth O’Gtha wrote:

> 	It really depends on the data.
> I've been faced with having to fetch various data, logs and binary files, from a
> distant virtual machine, without much power (only 2 cores, not a lot of memory),
> repeatedly, for tests.
> 	And bzip2 was my choice, de/compressing is almost as fast as with gzip,
> while compression ratio was half-way to xz.

Interesting. I wouldn't have even thought of trying bzip2.

I discovered something about xz. Its man page says:

-0 ... -3
 	These  are somewhat fast presets.  -0 is sometimes faster
 	than gzip -9 while compressing much better.   The  higher
 	ones  often have speed comparable to bzip2(1) with compa‐
 	rable or better compression ratio, although  the  results
 	depend a lot on the type of data being compressed

...and for the font 99MB font package I was playing with, that turned
out to be true. I added --compress -0 to the makepkg line in the
SlackBuild (also tried -3 and -6).

Looking at /sbin/makepkg... the default compression level is -9,
and it doesn't inherit from the environment. So if we wanted to
make the compression level user-selectable in the environment for
our SlackBuilds, we'd have to change the makepkg line in all 10,000
scripts... something like:

   /sbin/makepkg --compress ${COMPRESS_OPTION:-9} -l y -c n $OUTPUT/$PRGNAM-$VERSION-$ARCH-$BUILD$TAG.$PKGTYPE

I wonder if someone could talk Pat into making a one-line change to
makepkg? Replace this:

   COMPRESS_OPTION="-9"

...with this:

   COMPRESS_OPTION="${COMPRESS_OPTION:-9}"

If so, SBo users would be able to set the compression level without
us editing 10,000 scripts (and GPG signing them, which is the real
time-consuming part).