Daniel Baumann wrote:
On 10/05/2018 06:55 PM, Antonio Diaz Diaz wrote:
Has zstd improved since the last time I tried it[1][2]?
In the context of zutils, I don't think it matters if zstd is good or
not. zstd is available and people are using it, thereore zutils imho
should cover it.
(otherwise, with that logic zutils should not support xz either, right?)
Xz was not supported by the first version of zutils. Support was added
later because other GNU projects were (misled to) using it. Even so,
support for xz is partially optional. Both ztest and zupdate ignore xz
files if no xz decompressor is installed. I even have the hope that I'll
be able to remove xz support from zutils someday.
In addition to having a format that makes xz look good in comparison,
zstd seems an order of magnitude more difficult to support than any of
the four formats already supported. It does not provide an unique magic
string, and supporting dictionary decompression may be difficult. Zstd
is all about performance at any price for the needs of Facebook. Just
like brotli is tuned to the needs of Google.
I would prefer to not mislead the users of zutils by supporting a format
like zstd that considers the checksum an informative field that can be
ignored. "We [software developers] have a moral duty to choose wisely
the formats we use because everybody else will blindly use whatever
formats we choose"[1].
[1] http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html#why
In any case, I'm now so delayed with all my other projects that I can't
add support for any format to zutils in the next several months.
Best regards,
Antonio.
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