[arch-dev-public] LZMA - in or out? ([signoff] libarchive 2.6.0)

[Dan McGee]

On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 6:00 AM, Andreas Radke <a.radke at arcor.de> wrote:
> I'd like to keep unneeded packages out of core. I see no need to move
> lzma into core. We only support tar.gz for our repos. Whoever wants to
> use a different format can rebuild libarchive easily.
>
> I also wonder if our new tar package now supports lzma and lzop
> compression (no tests so far). Both packages were not present when
> building the tar package in he chroot. But even when it's now possible
> to use these formats at runtime they should stay in extra until we may
> use them for our repos.

I don't want to go too back and forth on this on the signoff thread so
I'll move it here.

I was thinking much more in the context of archives in general rather
than just pacman using libarchive. libarchive ships with bsdtar, which
I have found to be quicker than GNU tar at extracting (so I use it
nearly exclusively). It would be a shame to tell people "we don't
support .tar.lzma for anything"- that seems rather arbitrary, doesn't
it?

I too think [core] should stay as slim as possible, but when that
requires we compile our packages with a less than ideal set of
features, I want to at least give it some thought.

-Dan