<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">On 7 September 2016 at 08:46, Paul Eggert <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:eggert@cs.ucla.edu" target="_blank">eggert@cs.ucla.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Jon Skeet wrote:<br>
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So whose preference *is* lzip?<br>
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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....)<span class="gmail-"><br>
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I don't see that that's any argument for changing now.<br>
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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.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Perhaps the situation is not the same as it was before, though? Perhaps the data is being used in different contexts?</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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One option ...: distribute multiple formats.<br>
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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.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>It sounds like it <i>should</i> be a matter of adding a few lines per distribution format to whatever scripts are being used. Helping newcomers should be reasonably straightforward with documentation: "We have two kinds of distribution packages: one has separate code and data (point to the existing gzip files), and one includes (describe new contents here). The latter package is available in zip, gzip and lz formats."</div><div><br></div><div>There are plenty of other packages which allow a choice of compression format - for example, look at the Apache distribution site (<a href="https://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi">https://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi</a>) which allows the source download as tar.gz or tar.bz2.</div><div><br></div><div>I do acknowledge that it would be more work, but I suspect it would be less work than the time we've all taken to write all these emails so far, and it should be a one-time job... it shouldn't involve any more <i>ongoing</i> maintenance.</div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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<wbr>. That might be a nice thing to have.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>While that would be easy enough to do, I think there's benefit in having the files hosted on IANA as a single trusted source. (Then there's tzdist of course, but that's a whole other matter...)</div><div><br></div><div>Jon</div><div><br></div></div></div></div>