Re: lzip support

[Jan Engelhardt]

On Friday 2008-11-28 19:38, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Nov 2008, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
>
> It was my impression that Automake adopted LZMA utils without fully
> evaluating the impact. My own package is now distributing .lzma
> packages.

It's only great until something better comes up :)

> This is a big deal for it moving forward since changing the package
> format will break something. OS distributions are only recently
> becoming used to .lzma and have had to update scripts and tools to
> deal with it.

All I actually needed was a patch to the package builder (e.g.
rpmbuild) to unpack lzip without having to explicitly call lzip.

> Due to the preponderance of distribution formats, the actual amount
> of data on ftp sites is dramatically increasing rather than
> decreasing since packages feel that they must produce archives in
> every possible format.

Well talk to kernel.org for example. They are the ones still using gz
besides bz2 (and they got one of the biggest packages) even when we
can assume bzip2 is reasonably mature, more than any lzma.

> If an archive format was ever offered before, the feeling is that
> it must continue to be offered for the rest of time.

*sigh* well, everybody is entitled to do his own liking and
if that's providing all formats just because.