Hello, The gettext gzip-compressed tarball is over 16MB, yet an xz-compressed copy of that same tarball is just 6.4MB. Which would you prefer to download?
Numerous packages (coreutils, diffutions, grep, parted) have been distributing only xz-compressed tarballs for a long time, with no complaints. The change to enable distribution (creation at "make dist" time and signing/uploading at release time) is tiny. Please consider distributing .tar.xz tarballs alongside the classical .tar.gz ones. Here's the patch:
From a6f2a1ea3c33e8fa9720762d3c93619da2f4b301 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jim Meyering <[email protected]> Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2014 21:17:40 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] configure: also distribute xz-compressed tarballs * configure.ac (AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE): Add dist-xz, so that xz-compressed .tar.xz tarballs will be distributed alongside .tar.gz ones. --- ChangeLog | 6 ++++++ configure.ac | 2 +- 2 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/ChangeLog b/ChangeLog index 4e8f87c..1fb8811 100644 --- a/ChangeLog +++ b/ChangeLog @@ -1,3 +1,9 @@ +2014-06-04 Jim Meyering <[email protected]> + + configure: also distribute xz-compressed tarballs + * configure.ac (AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE): Add dist-xz, so that xz-compressed + .tar.xz tarballs will be distributed alongside .tar.gz ones. + 2014-06-02 Daiki Ueno <[email protected]> * gettext 0.19 released. diff --git a/configure.ac b/configure.ac index 6fa16df..21cac22 100644 --- a/configure.ac +++ b/configure.ac @@ -22,7 +22,7 @@ AC_INIT([gettext], [[email protected]]) AC_CONFIG_SRCDIR([gettext-tools/src/msgfmt.c]) AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR([build-aux]) -AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([1.13 silent-rules parallel-tests]) +AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([1.13 silent-rules parallel-tests dist-xz]) dnl Override automake's tar command used for creating distributions. am__tar='${AMTAR} chof - --owner=root --group=root "$$tardir"' -- 2.0.0.rc3
