xz-compressed tarballs?

[Jim Meyering]

I noticed that you're distributing gzip- and bzip2-compressed
tarballs.  Both are common, and bzip2 compresses well, but xz
compresses 25% (500KiB) better than bzip2:

    $ du -h bison-2.5*
    2.0M    bison-2.5.tar.bz2
    1.5M    bison-2.5.tar.xz

In case you're interested, here's a patch, though you might prefer to
drop bzip2 compression altogether and stick with just the most-common
gzip and best-compressed xz -- then "make dist" will take a little less
time than if it must create all three tarballs.

For the record, many packages now distribute only gzip- and xz-compressed
tarballs, and at least one (GNU cppi [*]) distributes only xz-compressed
tarballs.  So far, no one has complained.  Who knows... that may mean
xz is now sufficiently ubiquitous.  Or just that few people use cppi.

Jim

[*] cppi: http://www.gnu.org/software/cppi/manual/

>From 69f11345a18f8041831c4d6cb3bef23b0614ff36 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Jim Meyering <address@hidden>
Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2011 18:06:15 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] build: create xz-compressed tarballs, too

* configure.ac (AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE): Add "dist-xz", so as to
distribute the more compact xz-compressed tarballs, too.
---
 ChangeLog    |    6 ++++++
 configure.ac |    2 +-
 2 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

diff --git a/ChangeLog b/ChangeLog
index ac2f988..43ede1b 100644
--- a/ChangeLog
+++ b/ChangeLog
@@ -1,3 +1,9 @@
+2011-06-25  Jim Meyering  <address@hidden>
+
+       build: create xz-compressed tarballs, too
+       * configure.ac (AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE): Add "dist-xz", so as to
+       distribute the more compact xz-compressed tarballs, too.
+
 2011-05-29  Jim Meyering  <address@hidden>

        rearrange pointer arithmetic to placate -Wstrict-overflow
diff --git a/configure.ac b/configure.ac
index 6a0ba21..d5879fc 100644
--- a/configure.ac
+++ b/configure.ac
@@ -42,7 +42,7 @@ AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([m4])
 # releases, we want to be able run make dist without being required to
 # add a bogus NEWS entry.  In that case, the version string
 # automatically contains a dash, which we also let disable gnits.
-AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([1.11.1 dist-bzip2]
+AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([1.11.1 dist-bzip2 dist-xz]
                  m4_bmatch(m4_defn([AC_PACKAGE_VERSION]), [[-_]],
                            [gnu], [gnits]))
 AC_CONFIG_HEADERS([lib/config.h:lib/config.hin])
--
1.7.6.rc2.302.gc2115