Re: [gentoo-dev] Current unavoidable use of xz utils in Gentoo

["Eddie Chapman" <eddie@ehuk.net>]

Michał Górny wrote:
> On Sat, 2024-03-30 at 14:57 +0000, Eddie Chapman wrote:
>
>> Note, I'm not advocating ripping xz-utils out of tree, all I'm saying
>> is wouldn't it be nice if there were at least 2 alternatives to choose
>> from? That doesn't have to be disruptive in any way, people who wish to
>> continue using and trusting xz-utils should be able to continue to do so
>> without any friction whatsoever.
>
> So, you're basically saying we should go out of our way, recompress all
> distfiles using two alternative compression formats, increase mirror load
> four times and add a lot of complexity to ebuilds, right?
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Michał Górny
>

Yes that's a very good point, that was something I was wondering in
weighing up both sides, what the costs would be practically, as I don't
know the realities of running Gentoo infrastructure. And maybe the costs
is just too high of a price to pay.

I wonder if increased use of git repos rather than distributed tarballs
could be part of a solution to those issues, although that could put quite
a storage burden on every user. Unless they were all shallow git pulls and
the user could optionally choose to tar up the git directory after clone
with compression.  But yes granted then there is even more ebuild
complexity.