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

Aaron Griffin aaronmgriffin at gmail.com
Mon Jan 12 16:15:34 EST 2009


On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 8:31 AM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Where did this go?

Do we have any additional opinions regarding LZMA? Personally, I think
LZMA is great, and the new licensing (LGPL?) opens a lot of doors.
Personally, I can't wait to see squashfs-lzma to pick up speed.

I agree with Dan though - libarchive isn't just a dep of pacman. We
also ship bsdtar, which I use quite often.


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