LZMA source tarballs

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Dear Inkscape developers,

Please, distribute lzip compressed source tarballs in addition, or instead of, the bzip2ed ones. The size savings are about 66% and 52% with respect to gzip and bzip2!

-rw-r--r-- 1 antonio users 20742550 2010-03-15 18:02 inkscape-0.47.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 antonio users 9851744 2010-03-15 18:02 inkscape-0.47.tar.lz

Lzip also decompresses much faster than bzip2:

$ time -p bzip2 -t inkscape-0.47.tar.bz2
real 7.73
user 7.73
sys 0.00

$ time -p lzip -t inkscape-0.47.tar.lz
real 1.77
user 1.76
sys 0.01

http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip.html

Thanks and regards,
Antonio.

[Krzysztof Kosinski (tweenk)]

It's better to use the more widely supported tar.lzma archives. The compression is also slightly better.
http://lpar.ath0.com/2009/09/25/documentation-as-an-indicator-of-code-quality/

[Krzysztof Kosinski (tweenk)]

And the most important benefit is that they can be created and decompressed directly with GNU tar using the --lzma option, e.g.

tar --lzma -xf inkscape-0.47.tar.lzma

[Antonio Diaz Diaz (ant-diaz)]

Dear Krzysztof,

Krzysztof Kosinski wrote:
> It's better to use the more widely supported tar.lzma archives.

This is a very bad idea. The lzma-alone (.lzma) format is deprecated; it
lacks magic bytes and integrity checking. The efficiency of a program
can be improved; the shortcomings of a format are for ever.

> And the most important benefit is that they can be created and
> decompressed directly with GNU tar using the --lzma option, e.g.

Lzip files can be created the same way with tar 1.23:
   tar --lzip -xf inkscape-0.47.tar.lz

Or with the -I option for older versions of tar:
   tar -xf inkscape-0.47.tar.lz -Ilzip

Regards,
Antonio.

[Krzysztof Kosinski (tweenk)]

Hm, indeed. But lzip support is not yet available in Automake. I guess this will have to wait until a version of Automake with lzip support becomes sufficiently widespread.

[Antonio Diaz Diaz (ant-diaz)]

Krzysztof Kosinski wrote:
> Hm, indeed. But lzip support is not yet available in Automake. I guess
> this will have to wait until a version of Automake with lzip support
> becomes sufficiently widespread.

Lzip support will be present in next version of Automake[1], but it can
take months for it to become "sufficiently widespread". In the meantime,
  if you feel the bandwidth saving is worth the trouble, a lzipped
tarball can be easily generated from the bzip2ed one with these two
commands:
   bzip2 -kd inkscape-0.47.tar.bz2
   lzip -9 inkscape-0.47.tar
[1]http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake-patches/2010-02/msg00028.html

Thanks,
Antonio.