Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: lzma tarball usage

[Fabian Groffen <grobian@gentoo.org>]

On 07-05-2008 16:23:12 +0300, Mart Raudsepp wrote:
> This is a plea and also a request for comments on the matter of
> using .tar.lzma tarballs or not, and for what packages this is
> acceptable and for what not.

Just as a little background:
GNU chose to switch from bzip2 to lzma, for it produces smaller files
(less bandwith) and decompresses faster.

They no longer provide the bzip2 versions of archives for newer releases
IIRC, so it's either tar.gz or tar.lzma.

> I'd be happy if some other unpacker is used than lzma-utils - one that
> does not depend on libstdc++ - I'm sure it can be done, heck it's done
> in integrated form in some other projects in less than a couple
> kilobytes of code for the unpacking from a VFS. Meanwhile please
> consider using the upstream provided .tar.gz tarballs instead and not
> roll patchsets in .lzma just cause you can.

See above why it might not just be "'cause you can".

> coreutils and linux-headers come to my mind out of system packages right
> now. I'm sure more dragons await me.

m4, that one gave me some headaches, because lzma-utils required some
eautoreconf, which introduced a nice cycle.


-- 
Fabian Groffen
Gentoo on a different level
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