On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 3:11 PM, Shlomi Fish <shlo...@shlomifish.org> wrote: : > One note: can the tarball also be supplied as tar.xz? I checked and it reduces > the size quite a bit.
I have considered that. I get 1053860 (xz) vs. 1265407 (bz2). So a saving of 200 KB. Less than a photo these days. GNU Parallel prides itself on being compatible with very old operating systems. These systems do not have an xz unpacker so the .xz version would have to be in addition to the .bz2 version. The xz-file takes around 80% extra disk space on the ftp-mirrors. These days most people will be getting GNU Parallel as a package from their distribution (thanks to you amongst others), and this package will be compressed using whatever the distribution uses. So these people will not see any difference. The packagers (such as yourself) will see the difference, but there are not very many of you so the possible bandwidth saving may eat itself in the extra mirroring that has to happen to the mirrorsites. Then there are people who downloads the source themselves because they need the newest version. With the exception of people on this list they most likely will not download every single release, but instead only download when they need a new feature/bugfix. My belief is that these are also relatively few, and the possible saving in bandwidth has to be measured against the extra harddisk space that an xz-file will take - and keep taking also in the future. Finally there is the hassle of setting up and keeping another format working to save 200 KB per release. All in all I come to the conclusion that the benefits are small and the downsides are just a bit bigger than the benefits. So for the foreseeable future there will not be an extra format. /Ole
