[Development] Qt 5 beta

Laszlo Papp lpapp at kde.org
Thu Aug 30 21:54:15 CEST 2012


>
> tar.bz2 is pretty common, along with tar.gz.
> tar.xy, OTOH, is quite rare.
>
> Googling tar.bz2 yields good results what to do with such a file.
> Googling tar.xy yields nothing useful about what compression engine is
> used even used; Googling "compressed file extensions" yielded Wikipedia's
> list of archive formats which finally produced some useful info - that it's
> an LZMA2 compression.
>
> While I understand that tar.xy may be smaller it's use general use seems
> to be limited so unless there is a supported platform/target that only uses
> tar.xy, I'd suggest dropping it and keeping tar.bz2 instead.
>

+1.

Selecting xz, but not bz2 is a suboptimal decision in my opinion.

I would personally even go further with this, if there is no space
contraints for about 350 MB for such releases like this: it would be nice
to distribute all those three formats because each of them may be used by
several distributions and individuals.

"bz2" may be used by Ubuntu, Debian, Harmattan, Fremantle, debian based
raspberry pi, ubuntu arm based beagleboard and so forth. They can also use
tar.gz as far as I know, but at least for Harmattan we packagers for sure
prefer the bz2 variant.

"xz" may be used for Archlinux, Chakra, Frugalware, and so forth.

I do not personally see (apart from space limitations) why only certain
distribution formats would be dropped from the aforementioned, but others
not. It would not be too fair in my opinion. Even if any of those is
dropped, I would not drop the debian based preference because of the common
usage of the bz2 format here and there.

Laszlo
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