Log file compression (was: INN2 on a Raspberry Pi 4? | Migrating between instances of INN2)

[Christoph Biedl]

Julien ÉLIE wrote...

> If you think adding native support for xz compression would be useful, the
> program could be searched for in m4/compress.m4 and, if you build INN with
> the --with-log-compress=xz flag, it would normally do the trick (not
> personally tested though).

Well, I looked for all the places that mention gzip, duplicated the
block, and ended up with modifying

- m4/compress.m4
- Makefile.global.in
- include/inn/paths.h.in
- perl/INN/Config.pm.in
- scripts/innshellvars.in
- scripts/innshellvars.pl.in
- scripts/innshellvars.tcl.in

So it's pretty straight-forward and I have no problem with sharing it.
But this feels like going the wrong direction. The zoo of compression
methods is huge, and next week somebody would ask for lzip or zstd.

> Also, if we want to be smarter, allowing to change the compression method at
> run-time could be useful, for instance by adding a compressformat keyword to
> news.daily, which would pass it to scanlogs.
> It would even allow to pass options to improve the compression.  For
> instance with compressformat="gzip -9" to improve compression with gzip, or
> compressformat="xz --memlimit=50%" to limit the hog you mentioned.

This sounds like a good idea. Users should be able to fine-tune these
parameters.

And from your follow-up, that innshellvars.local idea, I'd call it an
ugly hack, and I am not that desperate to give it a try :)

And by the way, would it hurt a lot to replace the "Z" variable name
with something like "compress_ext"? While I'm one of those who still
understand where that comes from - technically it's wrong, and it's
almost 25 years since I've have last seen .Z files in the wild.

    Christoph