Re: [Bug-ddrescue] ddrescue tarball formats

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Hello Lars.

Lars Wendler wrote:
> The release of ddrescue-1.17 only has an lzip compressed tarball
> availabe but older releases were also available as gzip compressed
> tarballs.

Yes. I have made a 5 year transition to lzip. Gzip is becoming obsolete, 
so it had to be done someday.


> As it is common for Gentoo users to compile packages on their Gentoo
> machines we now have to make sure they have lzip installed just to get
> ddrescue-1.17 source tarball uncompressed which seems to be a bit of
> overkill.

I don't think so. Surely every user of ddrescue would like to know about 
lzip, because lziprecover provides data recovery capabilities which 
nicely complement those of ddrescue[1].

[1]http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html#Introduction


> So I'd like to kindly request continuation of providing gzip compressed
> source tarballs. Could that be feasible?

It is feasible but, what is the point? Lzip is available to Gentoo 
users, is useful to (some) ddrescue users, and gzip is going to be 
eventually dropped. Ddrescue is not the only GNU package distributed in 
lzip format[2], nor is the only one not providing gzip tarballs.

[2] http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html
"Various compression formats are used on the server: .gz is gzip 
(http://gnu.org/software/gzip); .bz2 is bzip2 (http://bzip.org); .xz is 
xz (http://tukaani.org/xz); .lz is lzip (http://lzip.nongnu.org/lzip.html)"


Best regards,
Antonio.