Re: [Bug-ed] GNU ed 1.10 released

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> Could I ask you to reconsider this decision, and continue releasing ed
> in some more widespread format, parallel to the lzip file? gzip,
> bzip2, and xz seem to be the popular choices nowadays, the latter
> being used by most of the GNU projects you've mentioned above.

Lzip is used by half the projects mentioned above, but not even one 
Gentoo package uses the .lz tarball in spite of being the smallest one. Why?

-rw-r--r--  1 67772 2014-01-22 23:42 ed-1.10.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r--  1 86946 2014-01-22 23:42 ed-1.10.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 63717 2014-01-22 23:42 ed-1.10.tar.lz
-rw-r--r--  1 64148 2014-01-22 23:42 ed-1.10.tar.xz


> It causes problems insofar as users will have to install another
> unpacker for a single package.

This is easy to fix. Just make Gentoo support lzip in ebuilds and 
install lzip by default, so that packagers can use easily the .lz 
tarballs distributed by the projects mentioned above and then some.


> I think you should leave the decision
> to them if they prefer lzip over other compression tools.

I don't know much about Gentoo but I think it is the packager the one 
who chooses the format in the ebuild, not the user. And surely packagers 
tend to choose the format supported by the build system of the distro.

It seems that the man-in-the-middle (the distro) is trying to impose its 
decision on everybody else, upstream, the packager and the user.


Best regards,
Antonio.