Follow-up Comment #11, patch #3301 (project freeciv): So, on the general topic of which compression formats to distribute in future (which this is probably the wrong place for, but never mind)...
> We're certainly late by introducing .tar.bz2 now when others > are already abandoning it. We've actually been shipping .tar.bz2 since 1.5.3(!), apparently (see here <http://download.gna.org/freeciv/stable/OLD/>). Since 2.0.0 we've been shipping all of .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, and .zip, the latter two presumably produced by the mandraulic release process <http://freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/Release#Upload_source_archives>. (I had no idea it was so easy to get automake to do it for you -- as you can probably tell, I don't really understand automake.) And then there was >>> there's always .zip as a fallback. >> We have .zip? > Yup. ...which resulted in patch #3331, now applied to S2_4/trunk. So now we have: * S2_3 building .tar.gz and mandraulic process to distribute .tar.bz2 and .zip * S2_4+ building all three from "make dist" (so users see nothing different) So, two remaining questions: * Back to comment #7: from 2.4, can we drop .tar.gz, and use .zip as the lo-fi fallback? ** (Excepting the anti-ZIP arguments we've already heard.) ** My vague recollection of days when gzip/zip were scarce is that systems had both, or neither (only "compress"). ** Sourceforge download stats for 2.3.2: *** .tar.bz2 (default for Unix browsers): 1300-2000/month (49% Linux, 35% Windows, 10% unknown) *** .zip (default for no-one): 320-480/month (86% Windows users, rest mostly split evenly between Linux/Mac/unknown) *** .tar.gz (default for no-one): 110-160/month (60% Linux, 26% Windows, 12% Mac, 3% Unknown) *** (For comparison, the Windows gtk installer is 7400-15200/month.) ** For me the bulk of the release time is uploading, so the fewer formats the better. If .tar.gz is genuinely useful then I don't put my personal convenience ahead of that of users, but if it's a waste of time I'd happily drop it. * Any reason not to port the bz2/zip automake changes back to S2_3? They'd save a manual step in future 2.3.x releases. ** Is automake 1.8 an onerous requirement? It only affects people building from svn or regenerating configure etc. Do these specific changes affect anyone who doesn't actually run "make dist"? *** (As current release manager, I seem to have automake 1.11.1, and am unlikely to regress.) ** Perhaps we're relying on it already? I notice a reference to "WANT_AUTOMAKE=1.8" at the top of autogen.sh (labelled as a Gentoo kludge). _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <http://gna.org/patch/?3301> _______________________________________________ Message sent via/by Gna! http://gna.org/ _______________________________________________ Freeciv-dev mailing list Freeciv-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/freeciv-dev
