Re: tar.xz packages?

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin at cygwin dot com>]

On Feb  1 00:23, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 08:11:20PM -0600, Yaakov (Cygwin/X) wrote:
> >On Tue, 2012-01-31 at 03:37 +0100, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> >> I'm not quite sure, but isn't it right that setup is capable of handling
> >> xz compressed tar files in the meantime?
> >
> >> If we decide this is desirable, do we just convert the entire
> >> release?  It would make things slightly easier for upset if it didn't
> >> have to know about multiple formats.
> >
> >But upset should already support both gz and bz2, so multiple formats
> >are already supported; would adding xz be that much work?
> 
>   slight·ly
>   Adverb:	
>       To a small degree; inconsiderably.
> 
> I would rather strip gz support in upset (and maybe even setup.exe) and
> just standardize everything on .xz rather than complicate upset.

I would rather see upset support .bz2 and .xz.  It's not only about the
mirrors.  Not every package is packed using cygport and some packages
have upstream scripts to create Cygwin packages, openssl for instance.
So a packaging change also requires an upstream patch.  Sure, this is
fixable, but we're all maintaining our packages voluntarily and it's
much more fun if things are taken easily, not under pressure.

> >> Yes, I know.  The mirrors! The mirrors! They will have to download the
> >> equivalent of 1.5 times a full release!
> >
> >An alternative would be to repack only the binary tarballs, not the
> >source ones.  The -src tarballs are generally barely compressed anyway
> >(since the bulk of the contents is a compressed tarball which doesn't
> >gain anything by recompression), so the few bytes we'd save by switching
> >them from bz2 to xz certainly aren't worth the bandwidth it would cost
> >to update the mirrors.
> 
> As I said above, as far as the mirrors are concerned, it's a one time
> cost - less than a couple of users doing full installs.  As far as
> sourceware is concerned, I'm willing to take the hit.

I don't see why this has to be done in one fell swoop, rather than
gradually.  What's the problem to keep the existing packages as .bz2
and change to .xz by updating one at a time?  It's not just sourceware,
all the mirrors have to update all the packages.  And there are mirrors
which in turn get their data from the first mirrors.  What about home
users behind DSL lines which have a Cygwin mirror for home use, which
are also hit by this?  Some of them have traffic restrictions.
That's a tremendous traffic this would produce for no good reason.  I'm
sorry, but I really don't understand why this traffic is seemingly of
no concern.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat