Re: Using .tar.xz only on ftp.gnome.org

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Germán Póo-Caamaño wrote:
>> I am not trying to criticise the effort rather than trying to
>> understand why is this such a big win.
> 
> The explanation is in the following previous thread:
> https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2011-March/msg00002.html
> 
> The problem is not storage, it is bandwidth.

Ah, I'd missed that.

This email says: "Last time it was asked (lots of years ago), there was
a mention that not everyone has 'bzip2'" - it seems the same is true
today of .xz.

So why not adopt the intermediate solution - drop .gz, and support only
.bz2 and .xz?


I also read with interest the xdelta stuff. The assumption seems to be
that many people downloading tarballs have the previous version already.
I would say that's a minority usecase... for my part, I tend to delete
tarballs after downloading & uncompressing them. And I'm sure that
anyone who might download every .tar.gz is using git. So most .tar.gz
downloads are probably not for every version, just one now & again,
perhaps when an app requires a module that isn't yet packaged.

I would be interested to see download stats for the xd3 files once they
go live! xdelta3 is very cool, even if few people use it.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org