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

[Deborah Goldsmith]

As far as I can tell, lzip is only used on Linux. There are no tools that ship with macOS or Windows (out of the box) that can decode it.

Adopting lzip as the primary format at this point seems like a statement that only Linux matters.

Debbie

> On Sep 7, 2016, at 2:01 PM, Russ Allbery <eagle at eyrie.org> wrote:
> 
> Deborah Goldsmith <goldsmit at apple.com> writes:
> 
>> Maybe we should wait until lzip is widely available before adopting it?
> 
>> Meanwhile, bzip2 is already widely adopted, and is smaller than gzip.
> 
> My impression is that bzip2 is dying and offers no great advantages at
> this point.  Those who are looking for the best compression are using
> either xz or lzip.  Those who care primarily about backward compatibility
> are using gzip.  bzip2 is falling between those two stools: it's much
> newer than gzip and not as widely-supported, and it's larger (and I think
> slower to decompress although I could be wrong) than either xz or lzip.
> 
> I would not introduce bzip2 into anything that wasn't already using it at
> this point.
> 
> I think the current plan is a good one: stick with gzip for the supported,
> stable distribution, add an experimental distribution that can play around
> with compression and contents, and worry later (possibly much later) about
> when the stable distribution might be worth changing.  At some point, gzip
> will probably go the way of compress, but we're not there yet.  (It will
> probably take longer than the replacement of compress with gzip took,
> since there aren't patent issues driving the matter the way that there
> were for compress.)
> 
> -- 
> Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>