Idea - image compression on makepkg

pfreire · 2008-05-23 15:14:44

Hello,

I was thinking after checking that we waste some space in packages due to bad PNG and maybe JPG compression. How hard would it be to implement some directive on makepkg.conf to do something to optimize compression on images?

suggested tools since they implement lossless compression:
- advpng
- jpegtran

I can already do something about it, but it would be nice to have it on makepkg:

find . -name "*.png" -exec advpng -z -4 {} \;

What do you think?

Last edited by pfreire (2008-05-23 15:15:42)

SpookyET · 2008-05-23 15:34:13

Bad idea. They generally further compress by removing metadata. I want my metadata.

pfreire · 2008-05-23 15:48:03

You must be referring to JPG files, PNG files compress a lot more and they don't lose metadata. But as I said this would be completely optional for your own packages (specially oriented to those documentation directories with a lot of png's).

Last edited by pfreire (2008-05-23 15:50:31)

bwalk · 2008-05-23 15:58:41

In a world where the prize for disk space is at 0.15€ and everybody and their mother having broadband I have one question: why?

pfreire · 2008-05-23 16:04:24

That's how microsoft always think. If you save some ms in reading some data you are improving performance of your system. It may not mean a thing to you but this is crucial for instance in a pocket pc, were I could really improve performance on some of my uses.

Well, forget it.

SpookyET · 2008-05-23 16:18:52

doc files are generally stripped.

oliwer · 2008-05-23 17:59:06

Do you have some packages in your mind that could use some image optimization ?

pfreire · 2008-05-23 18:16:05

Many KDE applications (digikam, krusader, etc) use a lot of PNG so there you'll find the best results. KDE documentation uses a lot of PNG's as well.

Redroar · 2008-05-23 21:44:54

bwalk wrote:

In a world where the prize for disk space is at 0.15€ and everybody and their mother having broadband I have one question: why?

Because not everyone has 0.15€/GB to spend on disk space, and not everyone has broadband...I don't have broadband, can't get it where I live. Satellite's too expensive for the meager speed you get out of it. So I have dial-up. It works....slowly. But when someone suggests something that takes 15-20 minutes off of a download (for me), that's a real help. Why waste disk space and bandwidth when there is no reason to?

dunc · 2008-05-23 22:26:58

Indeed. And even with broadband, many people have usage limits. Every little saving on bandwidth helps, although I'm not sure image compression is the place to start.

(It might be for the web in general, but not Arch packages.)

Redroar · 2008-05-23 22:52:32

True, it would probably be more trouble than it's worth (10 more minutes downloading vs 1 hour debugging botched .pngs), but I still like to see when people care enough to want to make it more accessible. Even for us poor souls who can't get broadband.

scj · 2008-05-24 07:55:10

I would suspect that the actual size reduction would be negligible, but it would be fairly simple to try it out to compare the sizes on some image heavy packages for anyone who is interested.

11010010110 · 2008-05-24 10:06:07

We may split packages and move the unnecessary images out

This includes stuff like icon themes and wallpapers and any other graphic that is not important

If Arch has something like USE = " . . . ." in Gentoo then we may make use of it there

Like we have Kdemod on a separate mirror with packages named kdemod-* we may build a mirror for graphics - reduced packages

Users with slow connection will install their DE from there. Anyway the bottle neck will be in their connection and not the server so few mirrors will do

If they want to add graphics to some package they may uninstall it and install the standard package instead

iphitus · 2008-05-24 10:37:13

It's not worth the complexity. Additionally, bigger gains could be made elsewhere, like an overall format change.

We've already discussed that other compression formats are better than .gz, but we dont use them because they're either too slow (bz2), or aren't supported by libarchive (some format discussed on ml that I have forgotten).

Pacman will accept whatever libarchive accepts.

Last edited by iphitus (2008-05-24 10:37:30)

pfreire · 2008-05-24 15:14:42

I agree there are bigger gains for instance using lzma as I did before (I was using my own distro before, using tukani pkgtools and crux ports) but it takes a little more time to build the packages. I guess libarchive still does not support it although I've read about some patches to do it...

Using advdef -z filename.pkg.tar.gz -4 will improve the compression ratio on packages (about 3% in average I think)

Last edited by pfreire (2008-05-24 16:41:46)

catwell · 2008-05-27 19:01:05

Bad images is an upstream problem. Just send them bug reports if you think they don't compress like they should.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-05-23 15:14:44

Idea - image compression on makepkg

#2 2008-05-23 15:34:13

Re: Idea - image compression on makepkg

#3 2008-05-23 15:48:03

Re: Idea - image compression on makepkg

#4 2008-05-23 15:58:41

Re: Idea - image compression on makepkg

#5 2008-05-23 16:04:24

Re: Idea - image compression on makepkg

#6 2008-05-23 16:18:52

Re: Idea - image compression on makepkg

#7 2008-05-23 17:59:06

Re: Idea - image compression on makepkg

#8 2008-05-23 18:16:05

Re: Idea - image compression on makepkg

#9 2008-05-23 21:44:54

Re: Idea - image compression on makepkg

#10 2008-05-23 22:26:58

Re: Idea - image compression on makepkg

#11 2008-05-23 22:52:32

Re: Idea - image compression on makepkg

#12 2008-05-24 07:55:10

Re: Idea - image compression on makepkg

#13 2008-05-24 10:06:07

Re: Idea - image compression on makepkg

#14 2008-05-24 10:37:13

Re: Idea - image compression on makepkg

#15 2008-05-24 15:14:42

Re: Idea - image compression on makepkg

#16 2008-05-27 19:01:05

Re: Idea - image compression on makepkg

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