Re: Steering committee, please, consider using lzip instead of xz

[Jeff Law <law at redhat dot com>]

On 06/07/2017 02:25 PM, Antonio Diaz Diaz wrote:
> Dear GCC steering committee,
> 
> This has been recently asked in this list[1], but in case you have
> missed it because of a subject line not explicit enough, I would like to
> appeal to you directly.
> 
> [1] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2017-06/msg00009.html
> 
> Since 2017-05-24 weekly snapshots use xz compression instead of bzip2. I
> suppose this means that release tarballs will also use xz at some point.
> 
> If this is the case, I politely request you to consider using lzip
> instead of xz. I have spent a lot of time during the last 9 years
> developing lzip and studying the xz format, and based on this experience
> I consider that lzip is a better choice than xz, now and in the long term.
> 
> I have been developing software since the early 80s, and I am a GNU
> maintainer since 2003. You are all experienced developers. All I ask is
> that you read carefully the following references and then consider lzip
> and xz based on their technical merits.
> 
> http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html
> http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip_benchmark.html#xz1
> 
> Also note that 'lzip -9' produces a tarball a 1% smaller than xz, in
> spite of lzip using half the RAM to compress and requiring half the RAM
> to decompress than xz.
> 
> -rw-r--r-- 1 58765134 2017-06-07 09:13 gcc-8-20170604.tar.lz
> -rw-r--r-- 1 59367680 2017-06-07 09:13 gcc-8-20170604.tar.xz
Given the breadth that xz already has in the distribution space, I'd
have a hard time supporting moving to lz over xz.

We've got far more important items to tackle than this.  But if you want
me to bring it up formally with the SC I can.

jeff

ps.  And just to be clear, I actually don't like xz and I'm always
annoyed when I run into something delivered in xz format.  But xz
support at the distro level is pretty ubiquitous at this point.