Bug#592300: XZ Utils 5 status?

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Lasse Collin wrote:
> On 2010-09-26 Thorsten Glaser wrote:

>> I’d rather suggest to abort if the memory for the compression level
>> selected cannot be allocated, but that may just be me. It’s uncon-
>> venient but unsurprising.
>
> That's what xz does now.
[...]
> Personally I can live with the current way, since I set limits via 
> XZ_DEFAULTS anyway. But maybe some other way would reduce the number of 
> bug reports.

I also like the current way, for what it's worth.  Maybe a passage in
README or README.Debian, something like this, could help.

	The memory usage of xz can vary from a few hundred
	kilobytes to several gigabytes depending on the
	compression settings.  If you would like xz to
	automatically scale down its settings while compressing
	to decrease memory usage, you may want to add an
	appropriate setting to /etc/environment or ~/.profile:

		XZ_DEFAULTS=--memlimit=256MiB
		export XZ_DEFAULTS

	See the section on "Memory usage" in the xz(1) manual
	page for details.