I'm also wondering whether the GNU system should recommend using zstd
instead of or in addition to xz for compression purposes. Automake
gained support for dist-zstd back in 2019 [1], but I'm not sure how
many projects are using it yet.
[1] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/automake.git/commit/?id=5c466eaf
For several years, GraphicsMagick distributed a tarball compressed to
zstd format. This started before Automake offered support for it.
I used these rules:
# Rules to build a .tar.zst tarball (zstd compression)
dist-zstd: distdir
tardir=$(distdir) && $(am__tar) | ZSTD_CLEVEL=$${ZSTD_CLEVEL-22}
zstd --ultra -c >$(distdir).tar.zst
$(am__post_remove_distdir)
With these options, the zst tarball came withing a hare's breath of the
xz compressed file size. I did not find any drawbacks.
I also had good experience with 'lzip', which has the benefit of a very
small implementation and more compact coding than xz uses.
I stopped distributing anything but xz format since that is what almost
everyone was choosing to download.
Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
Public Key, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/public-key.txt
