On 07.06.2017 13:25, Antonio Diaz Diaz wrote: > Dear GCC steering committee, > > This has been recently asked in this list[1], but in case you have missed it > because of a subject line not explicit enough, I would like to appeal to you > directly. > > [1] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2017-06/msg00009.html > > Since 2017-05-24 weekly snapshots use xz compression instead of bzip2. I > suppose > this means that release tarballs will also use xz at some point. > > If this is the case, I politely request you to consider using lzip instead of > xz. I have spent a lot of time during the last 9 years developing lzip and > studying the xz format, and based on this experience I consider that lzip is a > better choice than xz, now and in the long term. > > I have been developing software since the early 80s, and I am a GNU maintainer > since 2003. You are all experienced developers. All I ask is that you read > carefully the following references and then consider lzip and xz based on > their > technical merits. > > http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html > http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip_benchmark.html#xz1 > > Also note that 'lzip -9' produces a tarball a 1% smaller than xz, in spite of > lzip using half the RAM to compress and requiring half the RAM to decompress > than xz. > > -rw-r--r-- 1 58765134 2017-06-07 09:13 gcc-8-20170604.tar.lz > -rw-r--r-- 1 59367680 2017-06-07 09:13 gcc-8-20170604.tar.xz
I proposed and implemented the change to use xz instead of bzip2 because of the space savings compared to bzip2. I'm not commenting on the "inadequateness" of xz, but maybe it would better help lzip to address some project issues and promoting it as an alternative rather than appealing to the GCC steering committee. - lzip is not a GNU project (afaics), same as for xz. - lzip doesn't have a public VCS. - lzip doesn't have a documented API, doesn't build as a library, and I can't find language bindings for lzip. - lzip isn't (yet) used for software distributions, while xz is (and afaics xz is used for GNU projects in addition to gz). Matthias
