Would it be plausible to distribute both? That way users would not have to install lzip.
Cheers, Vanessa McHale > On Jan 20, 2020, at 4:15 PM, Ben Gamari <b...@well-typed.com> wrote: > > Vanessa McHale <vamch...@gmail.com> writes: > >> Hello all, >> >> >> GHC is distributed as .tar.xz tarballs; I assume this is because it >> produces small tarballs. However, xz is ill-suited for archiving due to >> its lack of error recovery. Moreover, lzip produces smaller tarballs >> with GHC (I tested with ghc-8.8.2-x86_64-deb9-linux.tar) and >> decompression takes about the same amount of time. >> > Indeed I recall seeing the "Why xz is not suitable for archival > purposes" blog post quite a while ago and considered moving away from xz > at the time but wasn't entirely convinced that the benefits would > justify the churn, especially since xz tends to be pretty ubiquitous at > this point while lzip is a fair bit less so. > > I'd be happy to hear further reasons why we should switch but I'll admit > that I still don't quite see what switching would buy us; we do have > a few backups spread across the planet so the probability of us having > to rely on the compressor for error recovery pretty small. > > Cheers, > > - Ben _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs