Re: make dist-lzma and make dist-xz

[Peter Rosin]

Stefano Lattarini skrev 2011-12-14 15:39:
> On Wednesday 14 December 2011, Peter Rosin wrote:
>> Stefano Lattarini skrev 2011-12-13 18:17:
>>> On Monday 12 December 2011, Peter Rosin wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hoping to fix the last fail in the testsuite, I looked
>>>> into adding something like LZMA_OPT or something to "make dist-lzma".
>>>> But in my cursory googling, I could not get my grips around what
>>>> variable to use. Does anyone know?
>>>>
>>> I don't, but I have another consideration: since lzma seems to be
>>> supersed by xz [1][2], couldn't we simply deprecate the `dist-lzma'
>>> option in this 11.1.2 version, and remove it altogether from the
>>> next major (or even minor) version?  WDYT?
>>
>> That seems a bit drastic to me.
>>
> Why?  After all, lzma is deprecated by its own author in favor of xz, and
> using a deprecated format/program to distribute software whose tarballs
> should remain available for various years at least (as is the case with
> most GNU software) seems like a bad idea to me.
> 
> BTW, I like Bob's idea that the `dist-lzma' option could just start
> producing `.xz' tarballs to avoid a too-sudden backward-incompatibility,
> so I'll likely go down that road (after 1.11.2).  Opinions?

Well, lzma produces LZMA streams and xz produces LZMA2 streams. As far as
I'm aware, they are not compatible, and older lzma implementations do
not handle LZMA2 streams. So, switching between them underneath the user is
not very polite. Given that the only problem with dist-lzma seems to be
that the test is failing on some minorish systems, I think it's a bit
drastic to just remove the support this soon.

But I, personally, don't care one whit if dist-lzma goes out the window.
I never used it for anything real and I couldn't care less.

Cheers,
Peter