Re: setup

[Achim Gratz <Stromeko at nexgo dot de>]

Corinna Vinschen writes:
> I'm still not quite sure what problem this solves.

Nothing earth-shattering, I just intensely dislike those long hex
strings.  But thanks for asking, I just had a closer look at the
real-world results and it turns out that there is an effect beyond
(questionable, I know) aesthetical considerations.

> Is it faster than plain SHA512 checksums?

I'd say it's a noticeable speed improvement, depending on where you get
that file from.  There are 17146 checksums in the 32bit setup.ini at the
moment.  That makes for a saving of 720132 bytes with Base64-URL vs. Hex
encoding.  I have another patch in testing that allows to use compressed
setup.ini (and xz compression) from "local" directories and since the
normal install is across the network, the reduced number of bytes to
push over the slow connection is making quite an impact.  But I was more
surprised to see that it is actually noticeably faster even when run
locally from an SSD.  Decompression in memory is still about an order of
magnitude faster than that disk read.  Now, even to the compressed files
are smaller, although that small difference is clearly not very
bothersome:

  5429375 setup32.ini
  4709243 setup32.b64url.ini (86.7%, -720132 bytes)
  
  1469297 setup32.bz2
  1440667 setup32.b64url.bz2 (98.0%,  -28630 bytes)
  
  1177528 setup32.xz
  1164856 setup32.b64url.xz  (98.9%,  -12672 bytes)

âwhich makes it all the more useful, I'd say.

> Just the reduction from 128 to 86 chars doesn't look like it's really
> worth the changes required in setup and upset.  What's the actual
> gain?

The changes in setup are really small.  Upset doesn't need to change, at
least not immediately.


Regards,
Achim.
-- 
+<[Q+ Matrix-12 WAVE#46+305 Neuron microQkb Andromeda XTk Blofeld]>+

Samples for the Waldorf Blofeld:
http://Synth.Stromeko.net/Downloads.html#BlofeldSamplesExtra