[arch-announce] Switching to xz compression for new packages

[Arch Linux: Recent news updates: Pierre Schmitz]

Pierre Schmitz wrote:

About a month ago we updated our tools to support packages that are compressed
with the xz format, also known as LZMA2. Compared to gzip this will decrease
package size significantly; about 30% smaller or even more depending on the
data. If you want to compress your packages with the new format change the
"PKGEXT" variable in the makepkg.conf of your build environment to
'.pkg.tar.xz'. Our tools like dbscripts, devtools, namcap and of course pacman
are able to process these packages. If you use any custom scripts which match
"*.pkg.tar.gz" files, make sure to change the pattern to "*.pkg.tar.*". To allow
a smooth update for older installations, for the time being the packages pacman,
pacman-mirrorlist, libarchive, libfetch and xz-utils are kept with gz
compression. (This is achieved by adding "PKGEXT='.pkg.tar.gz'" to their
PKGBUILDs) At this time, all Developers and Trusted Users are strongly
encouraged to switch to xz format.

URL: http://www.archlinux.org/news/490/