What to do with xz?

[Zbigniew Luszpinski]

> > > we've always assumed a baseline of gzip+bzip2 compression in the lunar 
> > > ISO's. let's not change that.
> > 
> > OK. Now I understand. This is politics not technology. My technical explanation or discussion is pointless.
> 
> Not really, let us wait a moment with this change. If we were to jump
> each technology that arrive that would be a full time job. The day gnu
> stop serving .gz or when more then 50% of the moonbase tarballs have
> an .xz equivalent, then it's certainly time to do the switch, right now
> I don't see the benefit.

I would like to see Lunar as the most fresh and innovative distro.
That is why linux-2.6, sse3, VDPAU appeared, now I tried with xz.
In IT the one who stays always looses.
Nobody will drop gzip just because xz appeared. Like bzip2 did not dropped gzip.
This is just fourth, better compressor than older compress, gzip, bzip2.
If we will not start using xz in moonbase in even single module it will never reach 50%.
The benefit is obvious like with bzip2: smaller files.

> > However this means nothing now because there is no xz sources in moonbase.
> > Writing this plugin was waste of time and resources.
> 
> What you're saying are just proving the point on how few maintainers
> that are using .xz. I don't see a problem adding modules with .xz or
> changing modules to .xz that are _not_ considered CORE modules.

Nobody uses xz in Lunar because:
1. There was no unpack plugin.
2. People usually increase version and count checksum in DETAILS.
   They do not check what lies next to $SOURCE on http/ftp/sourceforge.
   I do this. That is why I see xz/lzma and the rest is not.
3. Response on devel ML is showing xz is unwelcome in moonbase because
   there is common agreement we can use only gzip+bzip2.

Nice to see you would like to see xz for non core modules.
How about making common agreement that all non sustained modules can be converted to xz?
(Of course we do change to xz only when bumping version to new one).
Is it OK or too wide? If you have other idea share it on ML please.

> I'm ok with xz for unimportant modules, ie as I earlier stated, non-core
> modules. And it works perfectly fine as a plugin.

Thanks for trying. I hope your voice will help xz not dying in Lunar.

Zbigniew