[arch-dev-public] [PATCH] Support xz compressed packages

[Pierre Schmitz]

Am Montag, 15. Februar 2010 19:26:59 schrieb Aaron Griffin:
> I 100% agree with Thomas. Saying we "won't ever need it" is assuming
> that xz is the ultimate compression algorithm and nothing will ever be
> better. A year from now "zz compression" might come out and be
> awesome. Now we'd have to repeat this entire process for the zz
> algorithm.
> 
> Being flexible isn't about supporting old stuff - it's about supporting
> new.

I don't get it. I am not talking about making it impossible to add support for 
this for ever. It just about implementing only that what we need right now.

Well, I can just place *.pkg.tar.* everywhere, but the point I didn't want it 
that much is that it is not safe for the case where this pattern might match 
more than one file. So this patch was the most easiest and less intrusive 
approach I could think of. I know that we should rewrite the whole stuff in 
future. But this way we can start using xz right now and we wont loose any 
flexibility in future.

So, why don't we add this and use it for a while instead? We can alter the 
scripts anytime later if needed.

Another question: Do we really want to have all kinds of random compressions 
for packages in our repo or should we agree on one towards which we migrate 
step by step? This wont be a problem if we had a dedicated file name extension 
but this way everybody will just be confused.

-- 

Pierre Schmitz, https://users.archlinux.de/~pierre