Re: PROPOSAL: GNOME Volume Manager for GNOME 2.8

[Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk>]

On Sad, 2004-06-26 at 00:41, Sander Vesik wrote:
> Can you please clarify this part? Precicely what barriers do you see in 
> support for zip files using compression in free software? And why is that
> not affecting any of the libraries and prtograms (starting off with gzip)
> that also rely on the Deflate algorithm?

Compression will kill you because you have to decompress it, in each
application. You've just taken a 500Kbyte shared object (total) and
turned it into a 300Kbyte shared object and 25 500Kbyte private
uncompressed objects. Poof there goes 10Mbytes.

> A counterexample to "mapping zips will cause mapping and aligment issues" is that
> modern JDK-s do just that with their classes.jar file.

And they don't share the result. This is *not* an archive format. The
goal is that

- The data is mapped once shared by all users
- The data is usable directly mapped not copied

So we load the entire theme in 5 syscalls, 2 disk seeks. We use one
copy of the memory for all the gnome processes together.