[Debian-med-packaging] Question about proper archive area for packages that require big data for operation

[Laszlo Kajan]

Hello Benjamin!

On 23/04/13 15:13, Benjamin Drung wrote:
> Am Dienstag, den 23.04.2013, 13:51 +0200 schrieb Laszlo Kajan:
>> Hello Andreas!
>>
>> On 23/04/13 12:23, Andreas Tille wrote:
>>> On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 11:48:05AM +0200, Laszlo Kajan wrote:
>>>>
>>>> This email is to continue the discussion about free packages that
>>>> depend on big (e.g. >400MB) free data outside 'main'.
>>>
>>> In your practical case is this data say <500MB?  Are we talking about
>>> compressed or uncompressed data (= >400MB on users harddisk or on all
>>> Debian mirrors world-wide)?
>>
>> It is around 404MB, gzip compressed [1]. I think it is not arch
>> independent. I think BLAST databases (the main bulk in the tar.gz) are
>> sensitive
>> to the size of int, and endian-ness.
>>
>> [1] ftp://rostlab.org/metastudent/metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar.gz
> 
> You can use xz for the source and binary package to reduce the size. The
> default compression level for xz reduces the size of the source tarball
> from 415 MB to 272 MB:
> 
> $ ls -1s --si metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar*
> 823M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar
> 381M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar.bz2
> 415M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar.gz
> 272M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar.xz
> $ ls -1sh metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar*
> 784M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar
> 363M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar.bz2
> 396M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar.gz
> 259M metastudent-data_1.0.0.tar.xz

Ah great! Thanks for checking this. A lesson for the future. We will switch to xz. Best regards,

Laszlo