Re: distribute xz-compressed tarballs, too?

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Jim,

> Have you considered distributing xz-compressed tarballs for gettext?
> They would be about half the size of the gzip-compressed ones:

True, but it would need 50% more disk space on the ftp server and each
of its mirrors. 

Then, it requires educating the users about what kind of file this is
and with which tools they should unpack it:

  - The 'file' command from not too long ago does not know about this format:
    $ file gettext-0.18.1.*
    gettext-0.18.1.tar.gz: gzip compressed data, from Unix, last modified: Fri 
Jun  4 15:02:42 2010, max compression
    gettext-0.18.1.tar.xz: data

  - The 'tar' program knows about this format only since version 1.22.

The benefit would be marginal:
  - You get 500 GB disks for about $ 100 or less nowadays.
  - Most users have a bandwidth of 100 KB/sec or more. It does not really
    matter whether a file arrives in 150 sec or 75 sec.
  - Disk and network hardware is now frequently used for movies, which
    has file sizes starting at 10 MB and going up to 5 GB.
  - Distributors are free to repack the tarballs (in fact, Mandriva used
    .bz2 for everything some time ago).

Bruno