Re: New Exherbo+musl stage: x86_64-pc-linux-musl-20160621

["Matias A. Fonzo" <selk@dragora.org>]

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Hi Dalias,
El Wed, 22 Jun 2016 12:37:01 -0400
Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org> escribió:
> On Wed, Jun 22, 2016 at 12:20:30PM -0300, Matias A. Fonzo wrote:
> > El Wed, 22 Jun 2016 14:01:17 +0200
> > Shiz <hi@shiz.me> escribió:  
> > > > On 22 Jun 2016, at 01:22, Matias A. Fonzo <selk@dragora.org>
> > > > wrote: 
> > > >> The latest musl stage can always be found at:
> > > >> https://www.somasis.com/stages/exherbo-x86_64-pc-linux-musl-current.tar.xz    
> > > > 
> > > > Please, consider switching to another format, like lzip/clzip.
> > > > See:
> > > > 
> > > >  http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html    
> > > 
> > > Switching to a format almost nobody has a decompressor for,
> > > especially for something like a stage3 that is often extracted in
> > > a live environment with no options to extra install packages,
> > > doesn’t seem like a good idea.
> > > 
> > > - Shiz  
> > 
> > Distribute files and impose to your users in having xz, is a bad
> > idea.  
> 
> Decompressing xz is supported by busybox and internally by busybox tar
> and gnu tar, so I don't see any practical risk of the user not having
> support. On the other hand, nobody has ever heard of lzip or clzip and
> they're certainly not supported in the widely available tools.

GNU Tar has support for lzip, Star from Solaris, too.  And there's a
patch to include full lzip support in busybox:

  http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/lzip/busybox/
  http://savannah.c3sl.ufpr.br//lzip/busybox/README_busybox_lzip_patch

Lzip was created *before* than xz, as a replacement for the old
"lzma-alone".

Quote from http://lzip.nongnu.org/xz_inadequate.html :

"Then, why some free software projects use xz?

Because evaluating formats is difficult and most free software projects
are not concerned about long-term archiving, or even about format
quality. Therefore they tend to use the most hyped formats. Both
lzma-alone and xz have gained some popularity in spite of their defects
mainly because they are associated to the popular 7-zip archiver.

This of course is sad because we software developers are among the few
people who are able to understand the strengths and weaknesses of
formats. We have a moral duty to choose wisely the formats we use
because everybody else will blindly use whatever formats we choose."
 
> For a compression format (from the perspective of the party doing the
> decompression), the only technical details that are relevant are the
> compression ratios and the memory and time requirements for
> decompressing.
> 
> Rich

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