Speed ain't bad

[Bulba!]

On Fri, 31 Dec 2004 13:19:44 +0100, Reinhold Birkenfeld
<reinhold-birkenfeld-nospam at wolke7.net> wrote:

>> True; however, it's my understanding that compressing individual files
>> also means that in the case of damage to the archive it is possible to
>> recover the files after the damaged file. This cannot be guaranteed when
>> the archive is compressed as a single stream.
>
>With gzip, you can forget the entire rest of the stream; with bzip2,
>there is a good chance that nothing more than one block (100-900k) is lost.

A "good chance" sometimes is unacceptable -- I have to have a
guarantee that as long as the hardware isn't broken a user can 
recover that old file. We've even thought about storing uncompressed
directory trees, but holding them would consume too much diskspace.
Hence compression had to be used. 

(initially, that was just a shell script, but whitespaces and 
strange chars that users love to enter into filenames break
just too many shell tools)




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It's a man's life in a Python Programming Association.