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

Jon Skeet skeet at pobox.com
Wed Aug 31 08:30:29 UTC 2016


On 31 August 2016 at 08:53, Marc Lehmann <schmorp at schmorp.de> wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 05:21:09PM -0700, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu>
> wrote:
> > 1. Simplifying the distribution process. This can be seen in the proposed
> > changes to tz-link.htm describing how to download and extract the
> release.
> > The current tz-link.htm uses five shell commands to do that; the proposed
> > tz-link.htm cuts this to two. These simplifications will make
> configuration
> > errors less likely, as well as make it easier for newcomers.
>
> At the expense of a rather obscure compression format (lzip), support
> for which might have to be downloaded, compiled and installed first.
>

... and which may not have as comprehensive programmatic support in other
platforms, either.

For example, in Noda Time, the tools I've written use common .NET libraries
to perform the data extraction. That means without installing anything, I
can just point the tools straight at the IANA website.
That's definitely feasible for zip, tar, tar.gz and bzip2 files, but may
well not be the case for xz or lzip.

I don't know how many people this would affect other than myself, of
course, but there may well be others.

It feels like there's a pretty simple solution here: host multiple files on
IANA, and let users pick which one they want. I very much doubt that
storage size is a concern, and that way users on poor network connections
but with advanced compression tools can use those, and others with fewer
bandwidth concerns but more tooling concerns can use more common formats. I
would hope it wouldn't make the release process significantly more
complicated - just multiple commands to build the multiple distributable
files.

Now, that raises the possibility of *also* keeping the code/data split as
they currently are, as well as comprehensive distributable files - I have
no particular preference on that front.

Jon
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