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Re: lzip support


From: Jan Engelhardt
Subject: Re: lzip support
Date: Sat, 29 Nov 2008 00:25:28 +0100 (CET)
User-agent: Alpine 1.10 (LNX 962 2008-03-14)

On Friday 2008-11-28 21:37, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
>
>> > 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.
>
> Currently Automake does not seem to allow disabling gzip support.

no-dist-gzip? What I was saying: you do not have to run make dist.
You could run make dist-bzip2 instead. Producing one files as a side
effect of build system is one thing, but uploading them to a public
required manual intervention.

> It makes sense to me that periodically Automake maintainers make an
> evaluation (and with the blessing of the FSF) intentionally
> deprecate generation of certain archive types as new archive types
> are added. The intention would be to diminish the number of archive
> types, which needlessly clog disk space and consume developer time.
>
> Initially there would be a warning, and after a couple of years,

Woha, that's long. I take the freedom to usually do it within two
releases.

> the less desired archive type would be removed entirely. At the
> moment I think that it is more desirable for bzip2 to be deprecated
> than gzip since the compression advantage of bzip2 is not that high
> and it takes much more CPU and memory.

Well, compression always takes time. If you wanted to go for
the best compression-to-time-ratio, you would have to go with
uncompressed as the premium.

> Zip is quite wasteful, but
> is perhaps most useful for Windows since it does not require 'tar'
> and there is native support in Windows. It should only be necessary
> to support one LZMA format.

Now how many Windows users can actually run shell scripts (as
produced by autotools) out of the blue, without having, uh, a shell
(from cygwin or msys). Once they however have such a unix layer, they
also have tar and gzip at least.




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