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

[Antonio Diaz Diaz <antonio at gnu dot org>]

Matthias Klose wrote:
> I'm not commenting on the "inadequateness" of xz, but maybe it would
> better help lzip to address some project issues and promoting it as
> an alternative rather than appealing to the GCC steering committee.

It is not my intention to "help lzip", but to use lzip as a mean to help 
others avoid the "inadequateness" of xz. :-)


>   - lzip is not a GNU project (afaics), same as for xz.

Lzip is GPL, xz is not.

>   - lzip doesn't have a public VCS.

Why is this important?

>   - lzip doesn't have a documented API, doesn't build as a library,
>     and I can't find language bindings for lzip.

- The lzip library (lzlib) is at http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzlib.html
- The lzlib API is documented at 
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/manual/lzlib_manual.html
- Libarchive http://www.libarchive.org/ is a library that automatically 
handles lzip archives.
- There are language bindings for libarchive and I think that there are 
also some language bindings for lzip, but I don't have links for them.

BTW, lzip offers a parallel compressor (plzip) 
http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/plzip.html that uses lzlib and features 
multi-threaded decompression since 2010. Xz-utils still does not 
implement multi-threaded decompression because LZMA2 makes it difficult.

>   - lzip isn't (yet) used for software distributions, while xz is (and afaics
>     xz is used for GNU projects in addition to gz).

Lzip is used for software distribution of GNU projects, and contrarily 
to xz, it has never caused problems for excessive memory requirements or 
wrong type of CRC.

http://gmplib.org/download/gmp/gmp-6.1.2.tar.lz
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/linux-libre/4.x/4.10.17-gnu/linux-libre-4.10.17-gnu.tar.lz
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/guile/guile-2.2.2.tar.lz
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/guile-sdl/guile-sdl-0.5.2.tar.lz
http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/guile-www/guile-www-2.40.tar.lz
http://www.iana.org/time-zones/repository/releases/tzdb-2017b.tar.lz
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gettext/gettext-0.19.8.tar.lz
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/octave/octave-4.2.1.tar.lz
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gawk/gawk-4.1.4.tar.lz
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mtools/mtools-4.0.18.tar.lz
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/serveez/serveez-0.2.2.tar.lz
ftp://ftp.graphicsmagick.org/pub/GraphicsMagick/GraphicsMagick-LATEST.tar.lz
http://www.imagemagick.org/download/ImageMagick.tar.lz
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/rcs/rcs-5.9.4.tar.lz
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/solfege/solfege-3.22.2.tar.lz
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/alive/alive-2.0.2.tar.lz
https://github.com/westes/flex/releases/download/v2.6.4/flex-2.6.4.tar.lz


Best regards,
Antonio.