Re: [gentoo-dev] upstreams that release lzip compressed tarballs (tar.lz) only

[Lars Wendler]

On Thu, 20 Feb 2014 16:28:30 +0100 Ulrich Mueller wrote:

>Last time I checked, lzip compressed slightly worse and was slower
>than xz-utils, so there really is no reason why one would want to use
>it. Maybe more important, even if lzip was at par with xz-utils, the
>latter has won the competition and is vastly more popular.
>
>What was his argument for refusing a release in .tar.xz format?

You can find some of his arguments in https://bugs.gentoo.org/249059

>> So what can we do? Three solutions came to my mind which I list here
>> in the order first being my favorite, last being my least favorite:
>
>> 1.) Make portage's unpack function lzip compatible
>
>> 2.) Fix this on ebuild level: - add app-arch/lzip to DEPEND - add
>> something like 'tar --lzip -xf "${DISTDIR}"/${P}.tar.lz || die' to a
>> custom src_unpack() function.
>
>> 3.) Provide all affected source tarballs ourselves in a portage
>> compatible compressed format.
>
>> 4.) Try very hard to convince upstream to provide sources in
>> differently compressed tarballs.
>
>It would rate them in order 4, 3, 2, 1, with 4 being my favourite.
>
>Ulrich

Well, 4 is the most uphill of all solutions with little chance of
success. And even if we can convince some upstreams, we'd still have to
deal with the ones refusing our request.
3 is similar annoying as we have to make sure to provide these tarballs
like forever.

-- 
Lars Wendler
Gentoo package maintainer
GPG: 4DD8 C47C CDFA 5295 E1A6 3FC8 F696 74AB 981C A6FC