Re: Question: Packages.xz and Contents-<arch>.xz
On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 06:56:10PM -0200, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Nov 2012, Guillem Jover wrote:
> >
> > Although xz-utils is currently priority required, it should really go
> > back to optional, as dpkg stopped Pre-Depending on it some time ago.
>
> More like it should be in standard nowadays, along with bzip2.
What about deprecatianizing bzip2? There are no real reasons to keep it
afloat, there are no areas where it shines compared to the rest. It's only
claim for relevancy is that it was the only decent compressor popular in the
Unix world for a period of time in the past.
xz on the other hand is the current best, and it covers a big range of uses:
it can be both fast and good (-0) or slow-to-compress fast-to-decompress
with a great compression ratio (-6, or -9e if compression speed is totally
irrelevant). The only niches it doesn't win are frequently flushed streams
(ie, interactive) and faster-than-disk-IO compression (lzop/newcomers).
That deserves promotion.
Obviously, abusing priority just to artificially promote a compressor would
be, well, abuse, but it's worth noting that xz has been priority:required on
all Linux distributions for a while. This sounds like at least
priority:important would be reasonable.
--
How to squander your resources: those silly Swedes have a sauce named
"hovmästarsås", the best thing ever to put on cheese, yet they waste it
solely on mere salmon.
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