Re: Using lzip instead of xz for distributed tarballs

2020-01-21 Thread Ben Gamari
On January 21, 2020 11:44:15 AM EST, Vanessa McHale  wrote:
>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  wrote:
>> 
>> Vanessa McHale  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
>
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There is indeed precedent for this. IIRC, we distributed both bzip2 and xz 
tarballs for several years.

I'm not opposed to offering both, the biggest cost is the storage and that is 
relatively minor. I have opened #17726 to track this.

Cheers,

- Ben 
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Re: Using lzip instead of xz for distributed tarballs

2020-01-21 Thread Vanessa McHale
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  wrote:
> 
> Vanessa McHale  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

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Re: Using lzip instead of xz for distributed tarballs

2020-01-20 Thread Ben Gamari
Vanessa McHale  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


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