support for lzma in automake?

[Karl Berry]

Hi folks,

Could we have a new option in automake for making lzma-compressed
tarballs, a la bzip2?  The package to use is lzma-utils, from
http://tukaani.org/lzma/.  Generally, it compresses better and
uncompresses faster than bzip.

Jim, perhaps you would like to supply a patch :)?  (Jim was the one who
instigated this.)

The compression algorithm was invented by Igor Pavlov, a Russian
programmer, and the original implementation is his 7zip package -- but
he works only on Windows, and included a small bit of non-free code for
rar format (unrelated to the actual compression algorithm).

There's also a p7zip package which ports 7zip to Unix, but it still has
the nonfree code, no configure script, and retains the, um, unique
interface of 7zip.

lzma-utils, in contrast, has removed the nonfree code, has the standard
configure && make, and has more or less the same options as gzip and
bzip2.

rms has said ok to using it on ftp.gnu.org (for example).  Sergey is
looking into supporting it in tar.

Sorry for all the background.  Just writing it down while I'm thinking
about it, really.

Thanks,
Karl