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From: | Warren Young |
Subject: | Re: Autoconf distributions and xz dependency |
Date: | Fri, 02 Mar 2012 17:30:51 -0700 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20120216 Thunderbird/10.0.2 |
On 3/2/2012 5:10 PM, Eric Blake wrote:
we are doing users a favor by getting xz installed and commonly available in more places.
I went through both the .Z -> .gz and .gz -> .bz2 transitions. I recall a longer overlap period where major archive sites had everything in both the new and previous forms.
I don't much care if .gz goes away now, as .Z did before it. I'd like to see a .bz2 option for everything I have to manually untar for at least another few years.
The thing about the RPM example is that a new rpm program is installed by the distro that contains the new-format RPMs. You can't reliably install binary RPMs built on a newer system on an older one, so Linux distro makers can move to newer tech faster. You can't make the same argument for software installed from source. A lot of the users of such packages are bleeding edge folk, like yourself, but a lot are also people stuck on marginalized systems where they need to upgrade something and can't get a binary package, so they have to build from source. Folk in that latter class are likely to also be missing tar -J.
Sorry to be a speedbump.
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