thunderbird deb archives should use lzma compression

[Jérôme]

Anyway, thunderbird requires ~256MB of free memory during operation.

I think that all thunderbird Debian packages should use lzma compression method in order to decrease their size. The parameters of the lzma compression should be choosed in order to require a maximum of ~256MB of free memory for decompression.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: thunderbird 3.1.19+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.10.04.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-39.86-generic 2.6.32.56+drm33.22
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-39-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sun Mar 18 21:24:05 2012
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=fr_FR.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: thunderbird

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Please stop filing bugs like this. The deb size is only relevant on some install media and the mirrors. Once installed, the package is in its uncompressed form.

[Jérôme (jerome-bouat)]

When updates are released, each computer has to download it :
- it takes a while
- it use energy when operating an a laptop (which is using energy as well)

When choosing an alternative to gzip, maybe you could think about lzma whose decompression is usually faster that bzip2.

[Jérôme (jerome-bouat)]

This bug still occurs with 16.0.2+build1-0ubuntu0.12.10.1 version.

Below you see that xz saves 19% of archive size compared to gzip :
--------------
j@j-VB:~$ 7z l /var/cache/apt/archives/thunderbird_16.0.2+build1-0ubuntu0.12.10.1_amd64.deb | grep data
Path = data.tar.gz
Path = data.tar.gz
                    ..... 49664000 22364697 data.tar
j@j-VB:~$ 7z x /var/cache/apt/archives/thunderbird_16.0.2+build1-0ubuntu0.12.10.1_amd64.deb

7-Zip [64] 9.20 Copyright (c) 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov 2010-11-18
p7zip Version 9.20 (locale=fr_FR.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,1 CPU)

Processing archive: /var/cache/apt/archives/thunderbird_16.0.2+build1-0ubuntu0.12.10.1_amd64.deb

Extracting data.tar

Everything is Ok

Size: 49664000
Compressed: 22368922
j@j-VB:~$ gzip -c --best data.tar > data.tar.gz
j@j-VB:~$ xz -c -9e data.tar > data.tar.xz
j@j-VB:~$ ls -lk data.tar*
-rw-rw-r-- 1 j j 48500 oct. 30 02:33 data.tar
-rw-rw-r-- 1 j j 21826 nov. 1 12:38 data.tar.gz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 j j 17621 nov. 1 12:39 data.tar.xz
j@j-VB:~$
------------

Note that the decompression duration of a xz archive is slightly the same that a gzip archive.