Compressing distribution tarballs for release with xz

[Nick Schermer]

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 8:51 AM, Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac at debian.org> wrote:
> On dim., 2010-08-08 at 23:40 +0200, Nick Schermer wrote:
>> I wonder if this is a big improvement. Even if for example the
>> tarballs are, say, 40% smaller. The biggest tarball (4mb from thunar i
>> think, but a lot smaller for the rest of the packages) will be 1 or
>> 2mb smaller, do we care about that? And how portable is xz, because a
>> lot of people tend to run recent versions of Xfce on old distros.
>
> Another question is the balance between compression ratio and time
> compressing/decompressing, CPU/Mem usage etc.

That doesn't really matter I think, my whole point is: are our
packages large enough to get a *real* benefit from xz, because not
much is downloaded from the Xfce servers (ie. compared to
distributions, who really benefit from xz compression).
I personally think the gain is not enough (for normal users there is
nothing in it, no faster releases for developers and servers don't
really care) compared to the current support of xz and time we have to
change things.

Nick