On Jan 15, 2002 21:16 +0100, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> On January 15, 2002 09:03 pm, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> > Daniel Phillips wrote:
> > > Encoding the numeric fields in ASCII/hex is a goofy wart on an otherwise
> > > nice design. What is the compelling reason? Bytesex isn't it: we
> > > should just pick one or the other and stick with it as we do in Ext2.
> > >
> > > Why don't we fix cpio to write a consistent bytesex?
> >
> > Because we want to use existing tools.
>
> It's a mistake not to fix this tool. I'll post the cost in terms of bytes
> wasted shortly, pretty tough to argue with that, right?
Well, I doubt the difference will be more than a few bytes, if you compare
the cpio archive sizes after compression with gzip.
> > I don't think think this application alone is enough to add Yet Another
> > Version of CPIO. However, if there are more compelling reasons to do so
> > for CPIO backup reasons itself I guess we could write it up and add it
> > to GNU cpio as "linux" format...
>
> Oh, it is, really it is. It's not just any application, and GNU already
> has its own verion of cpio.
But then every person who wants to build a kernel will have to have
the patched version of cpio until such a time it is part of the standard
cpio tool (which may be "never"). I would much rather use the currently
available tools than save 20 bytes off a 900kB kernel image.
Cheers, Andreas
-- Andreas Dilger http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2resize/ http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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