Re: ftp and filesize shenanigans

[Lloyd Wood <L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk>]

On Thu, 5 Aug 1999, John Heidemann wrote:

> On Thu, 05 Aug 1999 22:40:09 BST, Lloyd Wood wrote: 
> >On Thu, 5 Aug 1999, John Heidemann wrote:
> >
> >> On Thu, 05 Aug 1999 17:34:08 BST, Lloyd Wood wrote: 
> >> >On Thu, 5 Aug 1999, Sean Murphy wrote:
> >> >...
> >> >> and found that the ns-src-2.1b5.tar.gz file is enormous. It's almost
> >> >> as big as the allinone files.
> >> >
> >> >15050579 Mar 17 01:12 ns-src-2.1b5.tar.gz
> >> >
> >> >14.4Mb! It's 14.4Mb! Look at the size of that thing!  Even ns-current
> >> >with nsdoc is only 11Mb. The old wireless version in the Berkeley http
> >> >server (which we don't mirror) seems similarly afflicted - 15.3Mb, yet
> >> >the new version is 8Mb.
> >> 
> >> The 2.1b5 release included some really big traces that we've since
> >> figured out how to handle better.
> >
> >details, please. I'm curious, because I handled it better and
> >repackaged it all smaller with
> >
> >tar cvf ns-2.1b5.tar ns-2.1b5
> 
> I can't explain that result, but basically we had some wireless traces
> that included periodic (every 1/20th of a second or something)
> snapshots of where every node was.  Unnecessary.

I think we might be talking at cross-purposes here (reminds me of that
conversation over that broken file on the ftp server a while back).
The problem here has to lie in the tarring itself.

You can take the 2.1b5 tarball, ungzip and untar it, retar it, gzip
it, and end up with something half as big comparable in size to the
other snapshots, without altering the wireless traces in any way.

I imagine gzipping would take care much of the periodic bulk in the
periodic wireless traces in any case; you might have an overly large
tarfile, but the resulting .gz file would be little different. I don't
have to regenerate the wireless traces to do make 2.1b5 smaller.

Did I miss a tar-using-unicode option or a symbolic link or something?

puzzled,

L.

gah. it's always annoying when the world doesn't work the way you know
it ought to.

<L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>