Re: Plan for release 2.29

[Antonio Diaz Diaz <antonio at gnu dot org>]

Dear binutils maintainers,

(Please, CC me, as I am not subscribed).

Tristan Gingold wrote 
(http://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2017-06/msg00216.html):
> On 20/06/2017 15:00, Matthias Klose wrote:
> > gdb already uses xz compression for it's release tarballs and
> > compressed diffs. GCC was also changed to xz compressed tarballs
> > instead of bz2, but keeping gz compressed tarballs.  Could the same
> > be done for binutils?
>
> Why not.

Because when GCC reluctantly[1] replaced bz2 with xz, Gerald Pfeifer 
recommended me[2] to keep pushing the strengths and advantages of 
lzip[3][4] to broaden its user base. But if binutils also starts 
offering xz tarballs, it will contribute to increase the bandwagon 
effect[5] which, as far as I can tell, is the main reason adduced to 
switch to xz[6].

Please, note that 'lzip -9' produces a tarball a 2% smaller than xz, in 
spite of lzip using half the RAM to compress and requiring half the RAM 
to decompress than xz:

-rw-r--r-- 1 19576763 Jul 24 12:41 binutils-2.29.tar.lz
-rw-r--r-- 1 20001232 Jul 24 12:41 binutils-2.29.tar.xz

Therefore, I politely request you to consider using lzip instead of xz 
as the third format for binutils tarballs.


[1] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2017-06/msg00042.html
"And just to be clear, I actually don't like xz and I'm always annoyed 
when I run into something delivered in xz format.  But xz support at the 
distro level is pretty ubiquitous at this point."

[2] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2017-06/msg00069.html
[3] http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html
[4] http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip_benchmark.html#xz1

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwagon_effect
"As more people come to believe in something, others also "hop on the 
bandwagon" regardless of the underlying evidence."

[6] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2017-01/msg00011.html
"From personal experience, the only reason Cygwin started considering 
the inclusion of xz in the distro years ago was because the coreutils 
tarball came in xz; and now Cygwin uses xz for all of its distribution 
files (it used to use bz2)."


Thank you in advance,
Antonio.