[Slackbuilds-users] txz?

[Ricardson]

a/pkgtools-16.0-noarch-2.txz:  Rebuilt.
  makepkg: allow setting COMPRESS_OPTION for xz as an environment variable.
  Thanks to B. Watson.

On Tue, Oct 6, 2026 at 6:29 PM B. Watson <urchlay at slackware.uk> wrote:
>
>
>
> 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)._______________________________________________
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