Re: [PATCH] maint: RFC: add lzip tarballs

[Assaf Gordon]

Hello,

On 01/13/2017 03:06 PM, Matias A. Fonzo wrote:
> This is not *his* duty neither a *should*.  A developer is a
> *developer*, not an expert in marketing.

Agreed, it's not his duty.

If he wrote a fantastic program and made it public and was content with
whatever happened - fine. With the "Natural Selection" of free-software,
other people would've started using it widely if they saw a clear
advantage, or would've ignored it if they didn't.

But Antonio is actively trying to convince people to use his program,
partly by sending emails repeatedly disparaging other programs.
I'd call that "marketing".

>> And an active community of means that there's actively on mailing
>> lists (or the likes of stack overflow), and some existing peripheral
>> projects (for example, binding in programming languages).
> 
> You are expecting a community to join in?  Be the community!

This is perhaps is the core of our different approaches.

Why should I join in supporting 'lzip' ?

I'm not saying it in defiance, I'm asking you (and Antonio) genuinely:
Please convince me, help me understand why lzip is worth the
trouble. And yes, I do think that if Antonio wants lzip to be widely
adopted it is his task/duty/priority/call-it-what-you-will to convince
me, not the other way around.
Sometimes, a great piece of code is all the 'convincing' that's needed,
and a project is picked-up naturally and becomes popular. It hasn't
happened yet with lzip.

The lzip website makes some interesting claims (benchmarks/
robustness / etc.). That's a good start, but they are not backed-up by
public code or tests, so I said I'm not yet convinced (and apparently,
not many others are).
Repeating these same claims further does not help (me).

I've written in a previous email things that I think would go towards
improving the popularity of lzip, and encourage more people
(the 'community' and myself) to give it a try.
I also mentioned red-flags that make me want to avoid it.

I have little else to add to this discussion...

regards,
 - assaf