[tz] [PROPOSED PATCH 2/2] Use lz format for new tarball

[Deborah Goldsmith]

So between the current distribution scheme and the proposed new scheme we’re saving about 210K total. Do we really need to worry about that in 2016? Is it worth the disruption to existing workflows? Unless some people are still using dialup, I don’t understand why this is important. Far more important is widespread support.

What is the goal for making these changes to the distribution format? It’s going to cause a lot of work for a lot of people. What’s the justification?

I think most customers of tz would be quite happy for the distribution to continue in its current form forever. What would you say to convince them this change is worth the effort?

Thanks,
Debbie

> On Aug 30, 2016, at 2:18 PM, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> 
> Antonio Diaz Diaz wrote:
> 
>> It is indeed an easy thing to add, and it has been requested a couple
>> times[1][2], but Igor Pavlov does not consider it a priority.
> 
> If it's that easy to add, perhaps you could do that and send in a patch. Even if it's low priority for the maintainer, if the code and documentation are already written it shouldn't be hard for the maintainer to install a patch. This would help encourage the use of lz format.
> 
>> I would consider bzip2 the second best choice; it decompresses safely on all platforms at the only cost of an unimportant increase in tarball size. IMO gzip is also fine. Xz is the only format that I consider should be avoided.
> 
> bzip2 is about 11% bigger than lzip for our purposes, though. The .bz2 combined file is bigger than the gzipped data file, which is a downer:
> 
>  $ ls -l tz*.tar.*z*
>  -rw-r--r-- 1 eggert eggert 202609 Aug 30 14:00 tzcode2016X.tar.gz
>  -rw-r--r-- 1 eggert eggert 394169 Aug 30 14:00 tzdata2016X.tar.gz
>  -rw-r--r-- 1 eggert eggert 426667 Aug 30 14:10 tzdb-2016X.tar.bz2
>  -rw-r--r-- 1 eggert eggert 382991 Aug 30 14:00 tzdb-2016X.tar.lz
> 
> As there are multiple free MS-Windows-based utilities that can decompress lzip format, I guess we can ask our MS-Windows users to use one. They can continue to use the existing gzip-based tarballs as well, since they will be distributed for a while.
> 
> So, I'm inclined to go back to .lz format despite the lack of current 7-Zip support, as in the attached proposed tz patch.
> <0001-Go-back-to-lz-tarball-improve-documentation.patch>