Phil Pennock wrote:
> I've had private mail on this topic too, making it the most contested
> feature of the new Exim release. That ... says something.
Yay - those bikesheds won't paint themselves!
> GnuTLS and some other projects now ship only .xz and .lz tarballs, with
> the .lz being smaller.
This feels sort of 90s with everyone suddenly using their own packaging
formats before going to the tar.gz standard.
> I'm not going to add *two* new compression formats. It's not even
> certain that I'll add one.
My feeling is that neither of these are compelling in any way - yes they
are better than bz2 - just - but it would take 31 downloads of that data
in .lz format to save the size of one bz2 download.
Heres a google docs SS with the figures for the RC5 distribution set:-
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ah5Bo78-JMXqdFJKeHhnSzZvZFk5RUQ1LUlDVEhvaGc&output=html
or smaller URL
http://goo.gl/4FqSF
> 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.
I confirm lz as smaller than xz and both smaller than bz2 -
> 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).
My feeling is lets keep out of this particular fight until a winner has
emerged. bz2 was a clear winner over gz, but neither of the new ones
are compelling on size. If they become compelling for other reasons
then we can go for it then... For now I'd prefer to watch from the
sidelines and not support either.
But this is all a personal opinion...
Nigel.
--
[ Nigel Metheringham ------------------------------ nigel@??? ]
[ Ellipsis Intangible Technologies ]
