[Development] Decrease amounth of delivered src packages

[Kevin Kofler]

Jani Heikkinen wrote:
> well, of course this would be possible as well but this would be a change
> to existing "behavior" : Currently 7z is with unix line endings. And as
> you can see from statistic tar.gz and .zip are most used ones and so on it
> would be quite reasonable to continue offering those

I would kindly request you to at least use tar.xz (rather than tar.gz) for 
the tarballs. (What you use as the Windows format is something you need to 
sort out with the Windows people.) The fact that tar.gz is still the most 
downloaded is probably mostly out of habit, or maybe your download site is 
directing to them by default (which ought to be fixed anyway, even if you 
were to keep both). tar.gz has no advantage over tar.xz, it is just a lot 
larger. Switching to the tar.gz tarballs (from the tar.xz tarballs that are 
currently used) would increase the size of distributions' source packages 
(source RPM etc.) significantly.

It is sad that the legacy gzip compression is living a renaissance due to 
automatic tarball exports from GitHub and the like producing only that 
format. It should finally be retired now that there are algorithms that are 
just as open and that compress significantly better. At least for projects 
like Qt that produce their own tarballs and are already able to produce xz-
compressed ones, I see no reason whatsoever to switch back to the obsolete 
gzip.

The bzip2 (tar.bz2) compression is also obsoleted by xz nowadays, I see no 
good reason to pick that one either.

        Kevin Kofler