On 2012-05-24 at 01:16 -0500, René Berber wrote:
> On 5/24/2012 12:32 AM, Phil Pennock wrote:
> > As an experiment, this time there are three versions of each file;
> > bzip2, gzip and lzip.
>
> .lz is not being used since .xz came up, and is the more common new format.
I've had private mail on this topic too, making it the most contested
feature of the new Exim release. That ... says something.
GnuTLS and some other projects now ship only .xz and .lz tarballs, with
the .lz being smaller.
I'm not going to add *two* new compression formats. It's not even
certain that I'll add one.
When looking, I picked the one which gave smaller files for Exim's main
source tarball. The only reason to use Yet Another compression format
is to have smaller resulting files.
If we add a new compression format, it will be the one which compresses
better. Compatibility is not an issue, since gzip/bzip2 provide
compatibility. (Licensing would be an issue if any contender were
antagonistic to the GPL, which Exim uses).
I note from Wikipedia that coreutils uses .gz and .xz and the Linux
kernel supports .xz, but when I look at Linus' tree, I see that lzma is
handled too. The gentoo claim is about .lzma being replaced by .xz, but
.lzma is not the same as .lz. My source for this claim is:
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip.html
-Phil
