As long as there are mirrors of coreutils on github, could people who need a tar.gz or a zip use the github feature to download any tag or commit by url? William
________________________________ From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of Collin Funk <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, September 27, 2025 3:15 PM To: Pádraig Brady <[email protected]> Cc: Coreutils <[email protected]>; Timothy Sample <[email protected]>; Jan Nieuwenhuizen <[email protected]> Subject: Re: no longer distribute gzipped source tarballs Pádraig Brady <[email protected]> writes: >>> p.s. I did a quick test with zstd (supported since automake 1.16.2 (2020)), >>> but the file size was about the same (a little bigger), >>> so I don't think we get enough benefits from enabling that. >> I don't see any harm in having a backup format. Remember the Jia Tan >> situation where everyone was rightfully afraid of running 'xz' until it >> was rolled back? > > Fair point. Though: > > coreutils-9.8.tar.gz = 15,171,745 coreutils-9.8.tar.xz = 6,234,824 I don't think we need to keep gzip, unless someone voices a need for it for bootstrapping. Or there is a desire to create archives using only GNU programs. Using the following patch: $ git diff . diff --git a/configure.ac b/configure.ac index 274eff42f..0380e08c3 100644 --- a/configure.ac +++ b/configure.ac @@ -35,7 +35,9 @@ AC_CONFIG_SRCDIR([src/ls.c]) AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR([build-aux]) AC_CONFIG_HEADERS([lib/config.h:lib/config.hin]) -AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([1.11.2 dist-xz color-tests parallel-tests subdir-objects]) +AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([1.11.2 color-tests parallel-tests subdir-objects + dist-bzip2 dist-bzip3 dist-lzip dist-xz + dist-zip dist-zstd]) AM_SILENT_RULES([yes]) # make --enable-silent-rules the default. dnl POSIXCHECK is worthwhile for maintainers, but adds several seconds We get the following: $ ls -la --human-readable --sort=size coreutils-9.8.11-bfcfe-modified* -rw-r--r--. 1 collin collin 17M Sep 27 11:56 coreutils-9.8.11-bfcfe-modified.zip -rw-r--r--. 1 collin collin 15M Sep 27 11:56 coreutils-9.8.11-bfcfe-modified.tar.gz -rw-r--r--. 1 collin collin 9.9M Sep 27 11:55 coreutils-9.8.11-bfcfe-modified.tar.bz2 -rw-r--r--. 1 collin collin 6.6M Sep 27 11:56 coreutils-9.8.11-bfcfe-modified.tar.zst -rw-r--r--. 1 collin collin 6.5M Sep 27 11:55 coreutils-9.8.11-bfcfe-modified.tar.bz3 -rw-r--r--. 1 collin collin 6.0M Sep 27 11:56 coreutils-9.8.11-bfcfe-modified.tar.xz -rw-r--r--. 1 collin collin 6.0M Sep 27 11:56 coreutils-9.8.11-bfcfe-modified.tar.lz lzip is good (.tar.lz) but not super common, at least from what I can tell. Paul uses it for tzdb distributions, so maybe he can comment on whether he has received complaints from users who do not have 'lzip' installed. bzip3 is also good, but I do not recall ever downloading a real archive compressed with it. Maybe in time it will be used more often? Also, the 'dist-bzip' option was only added in Automake 1.18. I got an error when trying to use it with the Automake version fedora ships: $ /bin/automake --version | head -n 1 automake (GNU automake) 1.17 I think that is a good enough reason to hold off on using it. We don't want everyone's ./bootstrap to start failing because their system does not have an automake supporting 'dist-bzip'. Zstd is also good and very common. Therefore, I would be fine using lzip or zstd instead of gzip. But allow others time to comment. Collin
