On 9/27/25 14:15, Collin Funk wrote:
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.
Is there a public domain equivalent licensed zstd decoder? Because
there's a public domain xz decoder at
https://git.tukaani.org/?p=xz-embedded.git;a=summary
