On 2019-09-03 Bernhard Voelker <m...@bernhard-voelker.de> wrote: > On 8/31/19 9:59 AM, Antonio Diaz Diaz wrote: [...] > > Bernhard Voelker wrote: > >> "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files. > >> xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing > >> only .tar.xz files is enough. > > > > It may be enough but, is it a good idea[1]? Is xz the format we want to > > leave to our children[2]? > > > > [1] http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip_benchmark.html#xz1 > > [2] http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html
> I pushed this change (in Oct 2017) merely to go away from .gz which > produces much larger files, and because several other GNU projects > also use it. > Just surfing through the recent releases on ftp.gnu.org, we see a > complete mixture of .gz, .xz, and .lz; some like gawk even distribute > all 3 formats. > I personally don't know much about compression, and therefore I am > just a "user": so while I do not want to fuzz with internals, I think > we need a format which is available per default on many systems. > I have access to at least a NetBSD box where lzip is not installed > while xz is. [...] Hello, FWIW Debian's source format supports gz bz2 and xz, with bz2 being in "kept for backwards compatibility"-status. Each addition of a new algorithm has been preceded by quite a bit of thought/discussion since getting rid of one is nearly impossible. So from Debian's pov xz is preferred. ;-) cu Andreas -- `What a good friend you are to him, Dr. Maturin. His other friends are so grateful to you.' `I sew his ears on from time to time, sure'
