gzipped files in tarball

[Tim Waugh]

It's quite bad form to include gzipped files in the actual tarball -- it means that (a) those files are being compressed twice, which gives bad performance for compression compared to having everything compressed together, as it allows common strings to share the global dictionary, and (b) distributions cannot easily apply patches to those files.

Better to ship those files uncompressed in the tarball, just compress the entire tarball.

[David Suffield (david-suffield)]

I understand your point. The compressed tar ball is not as small as it could be, but gziped files work better with automake and packages.

The gziped files are mostly PPDs. If PPDs are not gziped in the tar ball then they need to be gziped in a post-install hook. Post-install hooks don't work will at uninstall time because the file names have changed.

It is much cleaner to list gziped PPDs explicitly in the tar ball and let automake do the right thing with no post-install hooks.

[Tim Waugh (twaugh)]

I don't think that's the case. List the files as 'whatever.gz' in Makefile.am and let it compress them at build time, i.e. have the compressed files as build targets.

[David Suffield (david-suffield)]

Good idea :)