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

Stephen Colebourne scolebourne at joda.org
Tue Sep 6 07:22:45 UTC 2016


I agree with everything Jon just said. Using an unusual and difficult
to find compression tool is the wrong engineering trade off for this
project. Sorry, but it really must be zip, gzip or bzip2.

Stephen


On 6 September 2016 at 06:38, Jon Skeet <skeet at pobox.com> wrote:
> This sentence concerns me - the rest of the message sounded good:
>
>> Developers can easily get support for all the formats discussed
>
>
> That's just not true. Or rather, it's not true in a convenient fashion. The
> "tried and tested" compression formats (gzip, zip, even bzip2) have good API
> support within a broad range of programming languages. It's much easier to
> write code to deal with a tar.gz file than it is to: a) ensure that the xz
> tool is installed; b) create a temporary directory; c) shell out to run the
> tool and check that it was successful; d) use the files; e) clean up the
> temporary directory.
>
> If the only developer use of the files was "extract them from the command
> line and look at them" then I'd be fine with a relatively obscure
> compression format, but as developers tend to want to write tools to use the
> files - preferably without always having to go through the extraction
> process first - the benefit of wide interoperability trumps compression
> sizes, for me at least. And as we're only talking about a relatively small
> number of machines, a difference in compression size won't affect much
> network traffic.
>
> Jon
>
>


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