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Re: tar.xz packages?


On Tue, 2012-01-31 at 03:37 +0100, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> I'm not quite sure, but isn't it right that setup is capable of handling
> xz compressed tar files in the meantime?

I have a patch for cygport to generate xz packages ready, which will fix
this for many packagers.  Whatever others are using to build their
packages (including netrel?) would still need to be patched.

On Tue, 2012-01-31 at 15:37 -0500, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> I'll have to find an xz module for perl to get this working with
> Cygwin.  

Compress-Raw-Lzma and IO-Compress-Lzma (which requires the former) both
support XZ.

> If we decide this is desirable, do we just convert the entire
> release?  It would make things slightly easier for upset if it didn't
> have to know about multiple formats.

But upset should already support both gz and bz2, so multiple formats
are already supported; would adding xz be that much work?

> Yes, I know.  The mirrors! The mirrors! They will have to download the
> equivalent of 1.5 times a full release!

An alternative would be to repack only the binary tarballs, not the
source ones.  The -src tarballs are generally barely compressed anyway
(since the bulk of the contents is a compressed tarball which doesn't
gain anything by recompression), so the few bytes we'd save by switching
them from bz2 to xz certainly aren't worth the bandwidth it would cost
to update the mirrors.

> Another possibility is not to use .xz as an extension but decide to use
> some other extension (.cyg).  Then the format could change while the name
> stays the same.

Please don't, as that would make it a lot harder to unpack/view package
tarballs manually (e.g. neither File Roller nor Ark handled such a
renamed tarball correctly when I tried).


Yaakov



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