Bug 1744212

Summary:	drop in replacement for bzip2?
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Brian J. Murrell <brian>
Component:	lbzip2	Assignee:	Mikolaj Izdebski <mizdebsk>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	30	CC:	lzap, mizdebsk
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Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
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Last Closed:	2019-08-22 07:02:28 UTC	Type:	Bug
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Description Brian J. Murrell 2019-08-21 14:38:12 UTC

Description of problem:
Since lbzip2 performs sooooo much better on multi-core machines and given the prevalence of multi-core machines, it would be nice if lbzip2 could be installed *instead* of bzip2.  I.e. satisfy the RPM dependency for bzip2.

Comment 1 Mikolaj Izdebski 2019-08-22 07:02:28 UTC

Personally I agree, however this change proposal [1] was rejected [2] by engineering steering committee.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/lbzip2
[2] https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/1276

Comment 2 Brian J. Murrell 2019-08-22 11:42:12 UTC

Is it time to re-propose the change?  5 years have passed since that last discussion.  lbzip2 is 5 year more mature.

Has a library interface been implemented?

Comment 3 Lukas Zapletal 2019-08-23 06:51:39 UTC

The original bzip2 was released 1996 I think, that's level of maturity lbzip2 can't achieve so the argument will be still quite relevant. However I would like to propose something different - can we implement "alternatives" for bzip2/lbzip2? I am not sure if this is the right term, but I mean /usr/sbin/alternatives for being able to switch between the two. Don't see this as a half-baked solution, it allows many people to try to switch and see if it works fine under various workloads. This change would probably require changes for both bzip2 and lbzip2 packages, I haven't implemented alternatives yet myself.

Comment 4 Brian J. Murrell 2019-08-23 14:55:20 UTC

Using alternatives was actually the original proposal that was shot down.

Comment 5 Lukas Zapletal 2019-08-29 07:40:53 UTC

Well, not really. It was proposed to "set higher priority for lbzip2 in alternatives" however what I think would be a good step forward would be only to provide alternatives and lbzip2 as opt-in.