Subject: [bug#33600] Compressing nars with lzip or similar

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2018 15:48:24 +0100

Pierre Neidhardt <[email-masked]> skribis:

> Talking about this, I recently discussed with Ludovic the idea of compressing
> nars in Lzip instead of gzip.
>
> http://lzip.nongnu.org/lzip.html (benchmark included)
>
> I can work on some Lzip guile-bindings, it should be quite easy, then we could
> save some 10-50% (!!!) disk usage.

That would be sweet!

Though we have to keep in mind that today’s ‘guix substitute’ doesn’t
know about lzip at all (see (guix scripts substitute) and
‘call-with-decompressed-port’.)  So while lzip would be my preference,
we may not be able to use it until we can be sure our users can actually
unpack it.

Ludo’.