On Friday 2008-11-28 21:37, Bob Friesenhahn wrote: > >> > If an archive format was ever offered before, the feeling is that >> > it must continue to be offered for the rest of time. >> >> *sigh* well, everybody is entitled to do his own liking and >> if that's providing all formats just because. > > Currently Automake does not seem to allow disabling gzip support.
no-dist-gzip? What I was saying: you do not have to run make dist. You could run make dist-bzip2 instead. Producing one files as a side effect of build system is one thing, but uploading them to a public required manual intervention. > It makes sense to me that periodically Automake maintainers make an > evaluation (and with the blessing of the FSF) intentionally > deprecate generation of certain archive types as new archive types > are added. The intention would be to diminish the number of archive > types, which needlessly clog disk space and consume developer time. > > Initially there would be a warning, and after a couple of years, Woha, that's long. I take the freedom to usually do it within two releases. > the less desired archive type would be removed entirely. At the > moment I think that it is more desirable for bzip2 to be deprecated > than gzip since the compression advantage of bzip2 is not that high > and it takes much more CPU and memory. Well, compression always takes time. If you wanted to go for the best compression-to-time-ratio, you would have to go with uncompressed as the premium. > Zip is quite wasteful, but > is perhaps most useful for Windows since it does not require 'tar' > and there is native support in Windows. It should only be necessary > to support one LZMA format. Now how many Windows users can actually run shell scripts (as produced by autotools) out of the blue, without having, uh, a shell (from cygwin or msys). Once they however have such a unix layer, they also have tar and gzip at least.
