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

[Richard Biener <richard dot guenther at gmail dot com>]

On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 10:56 AM, Antonio Diaz Diaz <antonio@gnu.org> wrote:
> Richard Biener wrote:
>>
>> While openSUSE has it, SLES does not.  tar support seems to be
>> via calling the external lzip tool (failing if that is not available).
>
>
> You mean SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is using a format that does not
> guarantee safe interoperability among implementations[1] to "power
> mission-critical workloads"!?

SLES ships with and supports xz.  It doesn't ship lzip.  Source rpms may
have their tarballs compressed with xz and it looks like rotated logfiles
get compressed with xz.

> [1] http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html#fragmented
>
>
>> The decision to use xz was largely due to availability.  If we use lzip
>> and 80% of the users have to fall back to the .gz tarball that would
>> be pointless.
>
>
> For the case of SLES[2] I would say that avoiding xz is a must. IMHO SLES
> users are better served by falling back to the .gz tarball until the next
> major version of SLES is released than by suffering xz forever.

Not shipping xz to users is likely not an option given its wide-spread use.
Not using xz compression but sth else itself might, but I do not have a strong
opinion here.

Richard.

> [2] http://www.suse.com/products/server/
> "SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 is a highly reliable, scalable and secure
> server operating system".
>
>
> Best regards,
> Antonio.