[Pkg-fonts-devel] Possible abuse of dpkg-deb -z9 for xz compressed binary packages

[Sebastian Andrzej Siewior]

On 2014-09-02 14:08:57 [+0900], Changwoo Ryu wrote:
> "dh_builddeb -- -Zxz -Sextreme -z9" has been introduced to the
> pkg-font team when dpkg-deb default is not xz.
> 
> In my quick experiments with some font packages, "-Sextream -z9"
> option still gives  ~4% smaller size than the default. IMO this is
> still significant for big font packages.

I've been looking at the fonts packages and none of them is >= 64MiB. I
may missed one. The largest I've found is fonts-droid with 15MiB. The
option -7 uses 16MiB of dictionary and should cover everything.
Repacking it with 0…9 +-e gives

 3628188 data.tar.xz.9
 3628188 data.tar.xz.8
 3628812 data.tar.xz.7
 3634224 data.tar.xz.9.e
 3634224 data.tar.xz.8.e
 3634224 data.tar.xz.7.e
 3634224 data.tar.xz
 3638448 data.tar.xz.5.e
 3638832 data.tar.xz.6
 3642496 data.tar.xz.6.e
 3661528 data.tar.xz.5
 5564728 data.tar.xz.3.e
 5566484 data.tar.xz.4.e
 5672672 data.tar.xz.4
 5734224 data.tar.xz.2.e
 5796076 data.tar.xz.1.e
 5997608 data.tar.xz.0.e
 6249836 data.tar.xz.3
 6471240 data.tar.xz.2
 6632380 data.tar.xz.1
 7008652 data.tar.xz.0
15329280 data.tar

For this particular case the default setting (-6) produce "only" a 4.5 KiB
larger archive compared to -9e.

Sebastian