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 <meyer...@redhat.com> 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 <meyer...@redhat.com> + + 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 <meyer...@redhat.com> 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