------ Original Message ------
From "Eddie Chapman" <eddie@ehuk.net>
To gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org
Date 30.03.2024 16:17:19
Subject Re: [gentoo-dev] Current unavoidable use of xz utils in Gentoo

>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.
>
Huh ... I read your original message as

"wouldn't it be nice to have at least 2 alternative [implementations of 
xz-utils]
to choose from"

As long as the file format itself is not inherently messed up, the 
archives
could stay as .xz, only a "minimal" unxz (similar to unrar) would be 
required
to access the contents.

Regards,
s.