Re: [HACKERS] Custom compression methods

Hi,

On 2017-12-02 16:04:52 +0100, Tomas Vondra wrote:
> Firstly, it's going to be quite hard (or perhaps impossible) to find an
> algorithm that is "universally better" than pglz. Some algorithms do
> work better for text documents, some for binary blobs, etc. I don't
> think there's a win-win option.

lz4 is pretty much there.

> Secondly, all the previous attempts ran into some legal issues, i.e.
> licensing and/or patents. Maybe the situation changed since then (no
> idea, haven't looked into that), but in the past the "pluggable"
> approach was proposed as a way to address this.

Those were pretty bogus.  I think we're not doing our users a favor if
they've to download some external projects, then fiddle with things,
just to not choose a compression algorithm that's been known bad for at
least 5+ years.  If we've a decent algorithm in-core *and* then allow
extensibility, that's one thing, but keeping the bad and tell forks
"please take our users with this code we give you" is ...

Greetings,

Andres Freund