Hi, Matias Fonzo <s...@dragora.org> wrote:
> I am CC'ing this email to Antonio Diaz Diaz (author of lzip) and also > including Maria Bisen to have a different opinion coming from the > Debian project. Thanks for asking my opinion. After doing some research, I'm pretty sure that lzip is the best option for my use case. I don't have an opinion about the use case being discussed here, but I think that using a robust format is best. This is why in the past I requested to Debian support for lzipped source tarballs. Jesse Smith <jsm...@resonatingmedia.com> wrote: > having been on the receiving end of this > propaganda effort at another project where similar claims were > debunked, I am disinclined to believe the author's conclusions. > I don't remember that the claims made by the lzip author have been debunked. As I am interested in long term archiving, please, could you point me to where any claim made by http://lzip.nongnu.org/xz_inadequate.html was debunked? (The fact that you consider a claim unimportant doesn't mean that it is "debunked"). 3. The xz compression software is used by many projects, including > several Linux distributions which means it is used to compress a lot > of packages probably well over a million archives. If the document > linked above were accurate we could expect there to be thousands of > examples of unrecoverable archives, even if corruption was a problem > less than 0.1% of the time. This does not appear to be the case. Even > if it were, we can always create new archives from the git tree. > I think this paragraph doesn't reflect what the document claims. The document says xz files are fragile, not that xz files suffer from some kind of spontaneous corruption. Xz doesn't create the corruption, it is simply less able to recover part of the data once some external event causes the corruption (plain file system corruption). I hope this explanation helps you understand this claim. What the document means is clearly stated in the conclusions; "For long-term archiving, simple is robust". You wouldn't store valuable goods for a long time into a fragile container. In my opinion, the real trouble being made by the standardization of xz is not to its current users, but to the people who, misled by its wide adoption, may be using xz to compress long-lasting data. Maria Bisen
