Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Sukneet Basuta <sukneet AT gmail.com>]

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 8:02 PM, flux <flux AT sourcemage.org> wrote:
> It's necessary for stable sorcery to support xz, otherwise you'd be
> forcing all users to switch to either test or devel sorcery. If they
> don't switch and there are xz things in the grimoire that stable sorcery
> can't handle, then those bits in the grimoire will be broken for them.

Fair enough. But when sorcery 1.15 is pushed to stable, should we be
using xz over bzip2 or gzip given the option? xz-utils isn't a
dependency of basesytem, which is why I'm hesitant.

> Also, xz is not absolutely better than bzip2 or gzip. It depends on the
> particular material being compressed, as well as what compression levels
> are being compared for the respective compressors (both for compressed
> size and time for decompression), AFAIK.

True, but in most cases, xz has a better compression ratio and
decompression time. Upstream developers are going to (or at least
should) use a compression level that makes xz advantages over bzip2.
Why would they provide it as an alternative otherwise?