On Tue, Apr 2, 2024 at 6:05 PM Karl Berry <k...@freefriends.org> wrote: > > I'm also wondering whether the GNU system should recommend using zstd > instead of or in addition to xz for compression purposes. > > I'm not sure GNU explicitly recommends anything. Although the tarball > examples in standards.texi and maintain.texi all use gz, I don't think > even gz is explicitly recommended. (Which seems ok to me.)
As an extra datapoint, Debian does xz in some areas. From <https://wiki.debian.org/DebianRepository/Format#Compression_of_indices>: Clients must support xz compression, and must support gzip and bzip2 ... Servers should offer only xz compressed files, except for the special cases listed above. > Personally, I would support lz4 over zstd simply because more GNU > packages already use lz4.(*) Both lz4 and zstd are quite a bit less > resource-hungry than xz, especially for compression. I don't know if > there is a technical reason to prefer zstd. > > In general, I think it can continue to be left up to individual > maintainers, vs. making any decrees. Automake supports them all > (among others). --best, karl. > > (*) Looking at a listing of ftp.gnu.org, I see only gmp using zst, and > perhaps a dozen or so packages using lz. Basically always in addition to > another format. Jeff
