[Slackbuilds-users] txz?

[B. Watson]

On Thu, 8 Oct 2026, Yth O’Gtha wrote:

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

I wish I knew how I did that :)

> It feels there should broader testing to have a better picture.

Yeah. I've got to write myself a little test script that generates
reports like yours, and I'll let run on a few hundred packages while
I'm at work.

Probably should pick packages for different criteria. Like, ones with
*lots* of small files (icon themes), ones with large but compressible
files, ones with large already-compressed files (game data might have
lots of .mp3 or .ogg files, .jpeg images, compressed video...)

So our numbers will describe the same thing... you're *just* testing
compression speed, not the entire process of running the SlackBuild,
right?

I was thinking, my script would build a package as a .tgz, then
un-gzip it to a .tar file, then time how long it takes to compress
that file with the various compressors. That's basically what you're
doing, right?

> Here although lbzip2 is still looking like the best compromise.

Yeah.

> And I know a lot of peaople (myself from some years ago being one of them)
> « wouldn't have even thought of trying bzip2. » but it is clearly neither a bad
> nor an outdated tool.

You ever look at pbzip2? Parallel implementation, might be faster...
though makepkg can't use it unless it becomes part of core Slackware.

There's also a bzip3, apparently (I just found it on SBo, know nothing
about it).