emergency file server cleanup

[Alexandre Oliva]

Hello, Matias,

On Sep 18, 2014, "Matias A. Fonzo" <selk at dragora.org> wrote:

> Have you considered to use sourceforge as alternative?. It has mirrors
> around the world.
 
Not really.  But how would it have helped?  I surely wouldn't entrust
the primary copy of the source tarballs to it, so I'd have to keep them
on our server anyway...

> Why? Lzip can compress more than xz with a bit of tuning via --options.

Maybe it can, but when I compared the sizes of the files to decide which
one to keep, .xz files were consistently (if slightly) smaller than .lz
ones.

Maybe I'm not using the best options to compress tarballs, vcdiffs and
xdeltas with lzip.  Suggestions are certainly welcome.

> And it is not forcing users to possess a lot of memory to
> decompress .xz.

That is a point I was not aware of, so I had not taken into account.

> Lzip was designed for long-term archiving, having a
> tool to recover corrupt files.

I very much doubt it could recover corrupt files to the point that the
original signature would match, because that would require a lot of
redundancy to be added, which is the opposite of what a compressor is
supposed to do.  And if the original signature doesn't match, I wouldn't
trust the result, especially given that we have alternate paths to
obtain the tarballs.

> Ideal for linux-libre, especially because
> it is under the GPL.

Yup, lzip remains the promoted compression format in the GNU Linux-libre
Free Software Directory page.

Thanks for your feedback and for educating me on another aspect in which
lzip is superior,

-- 
Alexandre Oliva, freedom fighter    http://FSFLA.org/~lxoliva/
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Gandhi
Be Free! -- http://FSFLA.org/   FSF Latin America board member
Free Software Evangelist|Red Hat Brasil GNU Toolchain Engineer