Dear GCC steering committee,
This has been recently asked in this list[1], but in case you have
missed it because of a subject line not explicit enough, I would like to
appeal to you directly.
[1] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2017-06/msg00009.html
Since 2017-05-24 weekly snapshots use xz compression instead of bzip2. I
suppose this means that release tarballs will also use xz at some point.
If this is the case, I politely request you to consider using lzip
instead of xz. I have spent a lot of time during the last 9 years
developing lzip and studying the xz format, and based on this experience
I consider that lzip is a better choice than xz, now and in the long term.
I have been developing software since the early 80s, and I am a GNU
maintainer since 2003. You are all experienced developers. All I ask is
that you read carefully the following references and then consider lzip
and xz based on their technical merits.
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip_benchmark.html#xz1
Also note that 'lzip -9' produces a tarball a 1% smaller than xz, in
spite of lzip using half the RAM to compress and requiring half the RAM
to decompress than xz.
-rw-r--r-- 1 58765134 2017-06-07 09:13 gcc-8-20170604.tar.lz
-rw-r--r-- 1 59367680 2017-06-07 09:13 gcc-8-20170604.tar.xz
Thanks and regards,
Antonio.
