Loui Chang wrote:
If the patch is large then what's the problem with compressing it?
I would argue that we should not have large patches applied to Arch, or AUR packages at all. If there is enough patching, that constitues a fork, and we shouldn't be hosting project files for defacto forks on the AUR. They should find some other place to host their project. That large patch, and any other source tarballs should be downloadable from the project's webspace, not the AUR.
I mostly agree. I thought about my post afterwards and realized that there are very few cases in which a patch could be large enough to be worth compressing while simultaneously being appropriate for the AUR. There are probably some cases though in which large patches might be required to make something play nicely with Arch, i.e. something that isn't a fork but just a relatively large compatibility fix. I also just realized that compressing the archive itself probably makes compressing internal files redundant.