Re: Switch of GNOME tarball compression format: tar.xz only

[Gregory Leblanc <headmaster albus dumbledore gmail com>]

On Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 11:41 AM, Olav Vitters <olav vitters nl> wrote:
> In a few months, newly uploaded tarballs on ftp.gnome.org will only be
> available as tar.xz. Change occurs after the last stable release of
> GNOME 3.2, approximately on Nov 16 2011. This only for *new* tarballs.
> All existing tarballs on ftp.gnome.org will NOT be affected nor removed.
>
> Currently tarballs are released using the formats:
>  - tar.xz
>  - tar.bz2 (until 2011-11-15)
>
> ==> After Nov 16 2011 (approx.) tarballs will only use tar.xz <==
>
> For packagers:
>  - please package GNOME 3.2 using tar.xz
>  - default options are used for xz compression; requires about 9 MiB of
>   memory to decompress (bz2 uses 3700KB)
>
> For maintainers:
>  - for your information only; you do not need to do anything
>  - ftpadmin script will automatically handle conversion of compression
>   formats

Will this cause excessive load on the server, if everyone is uploading
.tar.bz2 or .tar.gz, and then we have to convert to .xz?  I haven't
run any real benchmarks, but the literature I can find shows that
creating the .xz files uses gobs of memory, and takes quite a bit
longer than either .gz or .bz2 files.

>  - it would still be nice if 'make dist' was changed to create a .tar.xz
>   file, using:
>     AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([1.11 no-dist-gzip dist-xz])

I suppose this pushes it off on maintainers, eliminating the problems
on the server.  I'm not sure if the time involved is still an issue
once this work is distributed, though.  Knowing you, Olav, you've
already thought of this and it's not a problem, but I figured I should
throw it out there anyway.  Thanks,
    Greg

P.S. Please CC me on replies if you want my input, as I only monitor
the -announce lists closely.