Re: Please add lzip support in the repository
On Thu, 15 Jun 2017, Christoph Biedl wrote:
> Also I doubt the reduced disk space and network bandwitdth usage of any
> new kid on the block (there's also zstd) really justifies the work
> needed to implement the support in the many tools that deal with the
> files. I might be convinced otherwise.
I agree with almost everything you said, but the whole point of using
lzip instead of xz would be for a less fragile on-disk format, not
performance (be it speed, memory usage, or compression ratio).
And I don't think we actually benefit any from a less fragile compressed
container format for Debian *packages* (source or binary).
We pretty much need Debian packages to be 100% correct in the first
place, they are not going to be subject to lossy recovery from
corruption (which is where lzip is supposed to be much better than xz):
we need to replace any that is even slightly corrupt with a fully
correct copy.
So, it would make more sense to have a par2 (or create a modern version
of it, actually) ECC layer on top of the compression layer, at which
point we can use one of the already supported compression formats.
And the same is also very likely true for data you hold dear. par2 ECC
information will allow you to recover from much worse file damage than
lzip's better format ever could.
Now, 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.
--
Henrique Holschuh
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