Re: xz-compressed release tarballs?

[Pedro Alves <palves@redhat.com>]

On 01/30/2012 07:54 PM, Stan Shebs wrote:

> So while we can certainly debate whether this feature or that helps or hinders future progress, I don't think it's in our interests to disparage all the legacy support.

Indeed.

Keeping things in perspective, it doesn't seem like we're at the verge of a shift of
mentality where people are rushing out to wack out all legacy support from GDB.  Although, it has
been pointed out that several GNU packages are already shipping xz only, including coreutils and
grep, without complaint -- this is a very good indication that dropping .gz isn't that much of
an obstacle as one might think at first sight.  But, for GDB, let's leave that for some other
day in the somewhat distant future, and move on.

The options on the table were:

 (a) tar.gz, tar.bz2, tar.xz
 (b) tar.gz, tar.xz
 (c) tar.gz, tar.bz2  (status quo, do nothing, for completeness)

tar.gz was still there in all proposals, which caters to older, legacy systems.

I'm also in favor of replacing .bz2 with .xz, keeping .gz, option (b), and it
seemed to me it got the popular vote.  IMO, Just Do It (TM).

-- 
Pedro Alves