Re: distribution tarball format [was: Announcing the release of GNU findutils 4.7.0]

[Andreas Metzler]

On 2019-09-03 Bernhard Voelker <address@hidden> 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'