Subject: bug#42162: Recovering source tarballs

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2020 14:49:51 +0200

Hi!

zimoun <[email-masked]> skribis:

> Moreover, the format is a long list, e.g.,
>
> (headers
>     ((name "raptor2-2.0.15/")
>      (mode 493)
>      (mtime 1414909500)
>      (chksum 4225)
>      (typeflag 53))
>     ((name "raptor2-2.0.15/build/")
>      (mode 493)
>      (mtime 1414909497)
>      (chksum 4797)
>      (typeflag 53))
>     ((name "raptor2-2.0.15/build/ltversion.m4")
>      (size 690)
>      (mtime 1414908273)
>      (chksum 5958))
>
>      […])
>
> which is human-readable.  Is it useful?
>
>
> Instead, one could imagine shorter keywords:
>
>     ((na "raptor2-2.0.15/")
>      (mo 493)
>      (mt 1414909500)
>      (ch 4225)
>      (ty 53))
>
> which using your database (commit fc50927) reduces from 295MB to 279MB.

I think it’s nice, at least at this stage, that it’s
human-readable—“premature optimization is the root of all evil”.  :-)

I guess it won’t be difficult to make the format more dense eventually
if that is deemed necessary, using ‘write’ instead of ‘pretty-print’,
using tricks like you write, or even going binary as a last resort.

Ludo’.