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

[Olav Vitters <olav vitters nl>]

On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 08:20:14PM +0200, Christian Persch wrote:
> 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.

Seems that was on 27 Oct 2005:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=320011

Now ~5.5 years later, so I think we're fine with PAX (Solaris has it
:P). I think it is better to be a bit more future proof (POSIX standard
+ no limitations). I still want to check with *BSD + distributor-list.

> 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

Agree bumping just for bumping doesn't make too much sense, but I'd like
to switch to xz only in Nov, so avoiding server recompression is nice.
It'll also allow maintainers to more quickly upload tarballs.
Still, there is indeed no real need.
Though IMO as jhbuild can easily install the required automake + is is
in a lot / all of the distributions + a lot of modules already require
this version, I don't think it matters much.
Note: A build system discussion is not for me (no idea) :-)


Discussed it tonight in the release-team meeting and got the feedback it
should be optional (due to your points) and that I had to check if there
is an issue with PAX. Still like to wait for more feedback.
-- 
Regards,
Olav