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Re: Please add lzip support in the repository



Hi,

Russ Allbery wrote:

>> As an user of Octave who wish to see more lzip adoption, I don't think
>> this to be fair.

> Octave's use of lzip is completely unrelated to Debian asking for xz.
> Providing xz in no way prevents Octave from also providing lzip.  I think
> you are inventing a conflict here where none exists.

I'd like to apologize for not being clear enough about what I was refering to
when speaking about a conflict of interest. Probably, I haven't explained it
well. I wasn't saying that there was a conflict with Octave. In any case, what
I think the conflict is goes as follows:

1- Somebody from Debian says: "if a lot of upstream tarballs start to be
natively avaiable in .gz and .lzip format (no .xz), *then* it becomes interesting
to at least support lzip for source packages"

2- An upstream decides to switch its tarballs from xz to lzip

3- Somebody else, also from Debian, asks the upstream above to bring back
the xz tarball

4- As a result, lzip is almost never used alone (without xz), and Debian can
justify forever the lack of lzip support

Thank you for your advise, but I'd like to make a brief comment.

> It's just a compression format....The world might be mildly better if more
> people used a better compression format, but no one is going to die.

How could you know? I would not make such an absolute affirmation.
IMO software must be taken seriously. It may end in places you couldn't
imagine: in a hospital's operating theatres, in an air-traffic control center,
or in the London stock exchange.

Moreover, software errors have already killed people:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Seville_Airbus_A400M_Atlas_crash

"Airbus Chief Strategy Officer Marwan Lahoud confirmed on 29 May that
incorrectly installed engine control software caused the fatal crash."

Maria Bisen

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