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

[Paul Eggert]

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.