Re: support for lzip (was: GNU Automake 1.11 released)

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Fri, 12 Jun 2009, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> Well, to be honest, I regard the addition of lzma support as a mistake
> in hindsight.  We should have waited and added xz support only, with a
> stable xz release.  It was also a mistake that I did not deprecate lzma
> support more prominently in the 1.11 release; will fix that for 1.11.1.

The Automake 1.11 release contains this forward-looking statement:

dist-xz'
     Generate an `xz' tar archive of the distribution.  `xz' archives
     are frequently smaller than `bzip2'-compressed archives.  The `xz'
     format will soon (early 2009) displace the `lzma' format.

Normally such forward-looking projections require a disclaimer in 
order to avoid a SEC investigation.

> So, where does this leave us for lzip support?  I'm not quite sure
> myself.  From a totally non-objective internet search, I see that it
> does not have a very large user base; but a comparison with lzma/xz user
> base is not conclusive.  From feature set comparison, I don't quite see
> the striking advantage that lzip offers over the choices already
> available.  If anything, then I don't like encouraging fragmentation of
> the API base.
>
> What do other people think?

I think that it is good that 'xz' is given such a distinctive name 
(rather than being called 'c' or 'the') since that means if I scour 
the Internet for it I have a better chance of finding its source code 
so I can use it.  Opportunity for finding it would have been increased 
if the Automake documentation mentioned where I could find the obscure 
package designated by these two letters.  If I am confused, then users 
of my package (which is currently using previously-blessed 'lzma' for 
stable releases) will be doubly confused if suddenly the files 
previously using .lzma extention change to a .xz extension.

The choice of 'lzma' or 'lzip', or 'xz' has more to do with being 
blessed by famous open source contributors than any technical factor.

None of these compressors is "popular" by any stretch of the 
imagination. None of my systems (not even Debian Lenny or FreeBSD 7.2) 
offers a program named 'xz' by default.

Lzma is a case of the cart being before the horse.  In the case of 
gzip and bzip2, these file formats were already quite heavily used 
when Automake added support for them.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/