[BBLISA] Compression Algorithms

[Edward Ned Harvey]

> From: David Allan [mailto:dave at dpallan.com]
> 
> On Tue, 29 Jun 2010, Daniel Feenberg wrote:
> >
> > I think that if you are sending files to another person, it is much
> more
> > important that he/she have the decompression software than that the
> file
> > be small. At least that is what I feel when I receive a file. It is
> part
> > of "be conservative in what you send", etc.
> 
> I agree with this logic, and I'd extend it a bit to say use the
> algorithm
> that makes sense for the task.  If I'm just compressing something
> trivial
> to mail to someone, I use gzip--it's fast, everybody pretty much has it
> now, and the compression ratio is acceptable.  If I'm archiving
> something
> huge that I really don't intend to decompress more than once or twice,
> then I'm going to use the maximum ratio I can find, with the caveat
> that I
> only use FOSS for this stuff partly because I'm a FOSS guy, but mostly
> because I don't want to run the risk of having the tool unavailable
> when I
> want the data back.  Or maybe it's data that I'd need to get back in a
> hurry because a need to recover would only happen during system
> downtime
> so decompression time is relevant...lots of parameters...


I also agree with this, and for the same reasons.

For what it's worth, 7-zip and lzma are both LGPL and GPL.  I've already
installed it on all my servers, and had no difficulty at all obtaining
precompiled binaries.

So I'm a convert.  I'm totally in favor of lzma now.