> Ralf Wildenhues wrote: >> * Antonio Diaz Diaz wrote on Tue, May 19, 2009 at 06:26:53PM CEST: >>>Do you plan to support the creation of lzip-compressed tarballs? >>>http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2008-11/msg00076.html >> >> Well, to be honest, I regard the addition of lzma support as a mistake >> in hindsight. We should have waited and added xz support only, with a >> stable xz release. It was also a mistake that I did not deprecate lzma >> support more prominently in the 1.11 release; will fix that for 1.11.1. > > I agree that adding lzma_alone support was not a good idea. (Among other > things, long term archiving of compressed data without integrity > checking can easily produce undetected data corruption). > > What I ask myself is, given the excessive complexity of the xz-utils > code and format, will we ever see a stable xz release? And even if a > "stable" xz is released, how stable can it be given that xz uses the > still in development LZMA2[1] algorithm? > [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel-Ziv-Markov_chain_algorithm
FWIW, the xz website claims the format is now stable[1], tar has added -J as a standard flag[2], and Slackware has bought heavily into the format[3]. So support seems to be building fast. [1] http://tukaani.org/xz/ [2] http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/ [3] "Fri May 8" ftp://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/slackware/slackware-current/ChangeLog.txt - Daniel