On 08/11/2019 18.10, Peter Maydell wrote: > On Fri, 8 Nov 2019 at 17:07, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé <phi...@redhat.com> wrote: >> On 11/8/19 4:43 PM, Eric Blake wrote: >>> bzip2 is no longer a favored compression. If we are trying to pick a >>> compression that is most likely to be present on any system, go with >>> gzip. If we are trying to pick a compression that packs tighter and >>> uncompresses faster, pick xz or zstd. But bzip2 does neither: it packs >>> slightly tighter than gzip but has slower performance in doing so, and >>> thus is no longer used as a default compression. >> >> The problem was with OpenBSD 6.1 which hadn't xz available. >> >> In commit 12745eaa02 Gerd updated the VM to OpenBSD 6.5 and we now have >> access to xz. IIRC OSX supported versions also provide xz. >> >> If we want to revert Laszlo's patches and apply his first version (using >> xz), we should do that during 5.0 dev cycle, now it is too late. >> I'd prefer we simply fix bzip2 for the next release. > > I don't think we should try to use 'xz' because I don't see > the point. We should use something that's generally available, > whether that's bzip2 or gzip. Life's too short to deal with > yet another file compression tool and format.
FWIW, on the weekend, I accidentially came accross this page: https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html After reading that, I also don't think anymore that we should switch to 'xz'. Thomas