[arch-general] Adopt tar.xz for official repo packaging ?

[Andrei Thorp]

Excerpts from Nathan K. Bathory's message of Fri Jul 03 09:28:22 -0400 2009:
> On Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:24:32 -0400
> Andrei Thorp <garoth at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Excerpts from b4283's message of Fri Jul 03 06:32:14 -0400 2009:
> > > i guess one of the major concerns is that tar & gzip is more common
> > > than xz. but since GNU is also packing their coreutils in xz packs,
> > > i guess that a good time to switch?
> > 
> > Well, one nice thing about being a distro is that you have some
> > ability to choose what stuff the users will have on their computers :)
> > 
> > And you really raise a solid argument in my view. That's like half the
> > size!
> > 
> > Does compression/decompression take longer? Are there any other bad
> > parts to using this compression algorithm that are worth mentioning
> > aside from lack of popularity?
> > 
> > (Note, isn't even bzip better at filesize than gzip?)
> 
> read through the archived posts, i'm sure this was discussed already ..
> iirc the issue was with implementing this in libarchive and some
> licensing issues.

Hmm, that's unfortunate. Though cutting bandwidth is similar to cutting
costs and maybe even decreasing throttling on the servers, no? Would be
interesting to do.

Another possible issue is the question of whether this sort of
compression works as well for the deltas system in pacman.
-- 
Andrei Thorp, Developer: Xandros Corp. (http://www.xandros.com)