Dear Tom,

I see you have replaced lzip files (.lz) with lzma-alone files (.lzma) 
in the distribution of solfege tarballs at the GNU site 
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/solfege

I think this is a bad idea and a step backwards[1], because while other 
formats have the means to detect errors, (and lzip is even able to 
repair some of them), lzma-alone silently produces corrupt data too 
easily. It is unable to even reliably detect single-byte errors.
[1]http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-mailutils/2010-09/msg00008.html

Take for example the file solfege-3.18.7.tar.lzma:

$ ls -l solfege-3.18.7.tar.*
-rw-r--r--  1 yo users 3712288 2010-10-31 23:37 solfege-3.18.7.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r--  1 yo users 2596228 2010-10-31 23:00 solfege-3.18.7.tar.lzma

Now change byte at offset 440276 of solfege-3.18.7.tar.lzma from 0x29 to 
0x3B and test it with lzma or xz:

$ lzma -tv solfege-3.18.7-bad.tar.lzma
solfege-3.18.7-bad.tar.lzma:     decoded successfully
$ xz -tv solfege-3.18.7-bad.tar.lzma
solfege-3.18.7-bad.tar.lzma (1/1)
   100 %       2535.4 KiB / 31.1 MiB = 0.080

Seems good, but compare it with the output of bzip2:


$ bzip2 -kd solfege-3.18.7.tar.bz2
$ lzma -cd solfege-3.18.7-bad.tar.lzma | diff -au solfege-3.18.7.tar -
--- solfege-3.18.7.tar  2010-10-31 23:37:23.000000000 +0100
+++ -   2010-11-22 14:40:04.000000000 +0100
@@ -369431,7 +369431,7 @@
  committer: Tom Cato Amundsen <[email protected]>
  timestamp: Wed 2006-08-02 20:05:56 +0000
  message:
-  Check for pygtk 2.6.0 in conigure.ac
+ /Makefile: added 2.6.0 in conigure.ac
  ------------------------------------------------------------
  revno: 204
  committer: Tom Cato Amundsen <[email protected]>
@@ -373835,7 +373835,7 @@
  branch nick: solfege.dev
  timestamp: Sun 2008-03-09 17:52:56 +0100
  message:
-  Check for exceptions every time webbrowser.openXX is used.
+  Makefile: exceptions every time webbrowser.openXX is used.
  ------------------------------------------------------------
  revno: 764
  committer: Tom Cato Amundsen <[email protected]>
@@ -373850,7 +373850,7 @@
  branch nick: solfege.dev
  timestamp: Sun 2008-03-09 17:54:18 +0100
  message:
-  Check for IOError when syncing the cfg database at exit.
+  Makefile: IOError when syncing the cfg database at exit.
  ------------------------------------------------------------
  revno: 766
  committer: Tom Cato Amundsen <[email protected]>
@@ -373864,7 +373864,7 @@
  branch nick: solfege.dev
  timestamp: Sun 2008-03-09 22:35:08 +0100
  message:
-  configwindow: check for exceptions when the user click the "Test"
+  configwindow: cakefile: exceptions when the user click the "Test"
    button on the "External programs" page".
  ------------------------------------------------------------
  revno: 768


In this case the user has been lucky and the corruption didn't affect 
the source code, but he may be not so lucky next time.


Best regards,
Antonio.

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