Re: GnomeGoal proposal: change AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE to create xz compressed pax tarballs

[Christian Persch <chpe gnome org>]

Hi;

Olav wrote:
> If nooone objects to this I'd like to get this GnomeGoal up and
> running asap (ideally before 3.1.2 unstable release on Jun 13).

I'd prefer tar-ustar over tar-pax. When I tried to use tar-pax once
(admittedly a long time ago) I got a bug report, and so switched to
tar-ustar. Also, the passage that Javier quoted from the gnu tar manual
about the 'future' version using pax by default exists there since 2004
and afaict nothing in this direction has happened since.

More generally speaking, I don't like bumping the automake version
required just to dist with xz. _Disting_ is something just one (or at
most a few) people do, while everyone else just _builds_ either the
tarball or from git. Since—if I understood your original mail
correctly—install-module'ing a .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 will still work and
create the .tar.xz automatically, I don't think a GnomeGoal to make
this change globally is warranted. (Individual maintainers can, of
course, still choose to bump the automake version and do dist-xz, for
their modules.)

Regards,
	Christian