[Development] Qt 5 beta

[marius.storm-olsen at nokia.com]

On 31/08/2012 07:29, ext Thiago Macieira wrote:
> On sexta-feira, 31 de agosto de 2012 13.08.39, Laszlo Papp wrote:
>> First: no, that is not true. We will store the upstream tarball as bz2 on
>> the Community OBS anyway due to the debian tools and technology on the
>> community OBS what we have.
>
> It's your choice to unpack and repack.

Most recent systems handle untar'ing of xz without problem. Instead of 
'tar xj' which you use for bzip2, you do 'tar xJ' instead of xz files.


>> Second: premature disk space optimization is not a problem for us, but the
>> RAM usage is. The small size has a price.
>
> gzip has a smaller memory footprint than them all.

And really, maximum memory usage for decompression of xz at -9 is 80MB. 
(Compression is 10x that.) Not sure at what level we compress it, but I 
guess we can tweak that to some lower level without affecting the 
outcome too much. -8 uses 40MB max, and -7 uses 20MB max, with -6 at 
only 10MB.


>> I am sorry, but I cannot (and do not wish) hang around IRC all the day
>> along, and filter for gerrit is suboptimal for community discussions. You
>> could say the same for the development related topic, you just need to
>> follow Gerrit, but this is not how the community decided back then about
>> that process. I like the community decision about this very much, and I
>> would like to see the same happening about the releases.
>
> If you don't read all the IRC channels and follow all changes in Gerrit and
> read all mailing lists, you WILL miss stuff. There's no way around that.
>
> I'm not saying you should do that -- I certainly don't. I only expect that
> major decisions get posted to the mailing list. Removing the bzip2 package was
> *not* a major decision.

It's not, with gzip and xz you have a choice of either maximum 
compatibility or maximum compression (shorter download time anyone?). 
The choice is yours.

And there's two aspects we really care about from a distribution point 
of view: 1) That everyone can get a hold of the sources (gzip/zip), and 
2) That the resources needed to get the sources is minimal (xz/7z) (many 
Qt developers don't sit on high-speed broadband connections, remember that).

Anyone with other special needs can do the repacking locally.

Remember that 7z was fairly unknown at one point too, but has caught on 
due to its extremely powerful compression, and is now well known and 
accessible anywhere. I'd say it's becoming defacto standard that people 
install 7zip instead of WinZip on Windows these days.

It's certainly the first thing I install on a fresh Windows installation.

-- 
.marius