Re: Replace 'pp' with 'prin1' to generate ELPA archive-contents

[Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> Stefan Kangas [2022-10-22 04:56:47] wrote:
>> Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net> writes:
>>> I've just tried replacing the 'pp' call with 'prin1' in elpa-admin's
>>> `elpaa-update-archive-contents', and on my checkout the size dropped
>>> from ~130 kb to 100 kb.  It is not much, but I don't understand why the
>>> archive contents should be pretty printed, and even a few kilobyte less
>>> can make a difference for some people.
>> If we care about 30kb, how adding gzip support instead?
>
> Gzippping this file and the tarballs would be a very welcome
> change, yes.  The main issue is to make sure all the expected clients
> can decompress those files.
>
> IOW we need to add support for that to `package.el`.
> The sooner the better.
>
> AFAIK it's pretty easy to add support to Apache to auto-generate the
> `.gz` files on the fly.  I tried setting up the server to do the
> opposite (automatically serving the uncompressed version of the file
> when the file name without `.gz` is requested) but couldn't get it
> to work.

I am not an Apache expert, but from what I read the "SetOutputFilter
DEFLATE" directive should enable gzip compression for requests where the
client supports it.