Re: distribute xz-compressed tarballs, too?

[Paul Eggert]

On 06/04/2010 10:36 AM, Jim Meyering wrote:
> Bruno Haible wrote:
>>   - Most users have a bandwidth of 100 KB/sec or more. It does not really
>>     matter whether a file arrives in 150 sec or 75 sec.
> 
> A user may not care, but the owner of the system from which hundreds
> of users are downloading may appreciate the difference in bandwidth.

As a user, I care.  It's often the case that my nominal bandwidth
is far greater than my actual download rate.  I just last night
downloaded files off a repository to my machine with a connection that
was 1 MB/s nominal, but only 10 kB/s actual.  I don't know why it was
that slow (most likely throttling on the server side), but this sort of
thing happens far too often.  I'd greatly appreciate a 2x speedup in
downloading.

If I recall, my main objection to switching compression formats when
Jim first proposed it was that the new format wasn't stable enough.
But this objection has less force if we also distribute .gz files,
as we should.