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

[Deborah Goldsmith]

Maybe we should wait until lzip is widely available before adopting it?

Meanwhile, bzip2 is already widely adopted, and is smaller than gzip.

Debbie

> On Sep 7, 2016, at 12:46 AM, Paul Eggert <eggert at CS.UCLA.EDU> wrote:
> 
> Jon Skeet wrote:
> 
>> So whose preference *is* lzip?
> 
> Mine, mostly. Antonio Diaz Diaz also expressed a preference for it. Admittedly he's biased, as he is an lzip maintainer. (I'm biased too, as I'm a gzip maintainer....)
> 
>> I don't see that that's any argument for changing now.
> 
> The point is that after we changed to gzip format, things turned out all right. This sort of change is not as much work as one might fear.
> 
>> One option ...: distribute multiple formats.
> 
> You mean .gz, .lz, .bz2, .zip, etc.? That sounds like it'd be a bit more work for me, for the staff, and for newcomers trying to navigate through the distribution.
> 
> If you like, though, you can take on part of that job, and it might be helpful to do do so as this is a good time to experiment with distribution formats anyway. You could maintain a downstream server, say, one that delivers other distribution formats. Right now in the experimental GitHub version, for example, 'make tarballs' generates a file tzdb-2016f-41-g6d70eda.tar.lz, corresponding to the 41st Git commit after 2016f, with abbreviated hash 6d70eda. So, your web server could convert that to (say) bzip2 compression format, and redistribute a file named tzdb-2016f-41-g6d70eda.tar.bz2. That might be a nice thing to have.