On 09/25/19 20:12, Tobias Leupold wrote:
Hi devs!
We provide all source tarballs xz-compressed. Now, apparently, xz is quite a
badly designed format (cf. http://lzip.nongnu.org/xz_inadequate.html ), and
lzip provides the same compression, but an apparently distinctly more
reasonable format.
I must admit that I personally neither heard about lzip, nor about xz being no
good choice until today, but the current tar even supports it through the --
lzip switch.
It seems to me that xz has more attention and popularity than it deserves, and
lzip has less. Did you ever think about promoting lzip by using it for
tarballs?
Just in case the criticism about xz is justified.
Everyone likes to promote their own compression tools. There are
hundreds, see e.g. http://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html
We should support the technology that is most commonly installed on a
user's system and on a server's toolchain.
It needed a long time until xz was established. Maybe lzip will
establish, or maybe zstd will. Or razor[1] will be open sourced and
spreads like a fire. Or someone makes paq8 1000 times faster. Only time
will tell, but until then, xz is what we have.
Christoph Feck
(who uses bcm for his compression needs :)
[1] https://encode.su/threads/2829-RAZOR-strong-LZ-based-archiver
