Re: [Bug-ddrescue] ddrescue tarball formats

[Lars Wendler]

Hi Antonio,

Antonio Diaz Diaz wrote:

> Lars Wendler wrote:
> > At the time of my initial email we didn't have lziprecover in our
> > repository. But I added it to our tree meanwhile.
> 
> Thanks.

You're welcome :)

> I guess lziprecover was in Gentoo's repository at least until 19 Mar 
> 2012 as part of the lzip package[1]. In version 1.13 lzip and 
> lziprecover became two separate projects.
> 
> [1]http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/app-arch/lzip/ChangeLog?view=markup

Quite likely. I suppose our maintainers of lzip (currently the team for
base-system packages) didn't recognize the outsourcing of lziprecover.

> > Still lziprecover is no hard requirement for ddrescue and thus I'd
> > prefer to have ddresue tarball in some different compressed format
> > available.
> 
> Ddrescue 1.18 is planned to produce new types of log files[2] and 
> compress them using lzip. So lzip could become a hard requirement for 
> ddrescue soon.
> 
> [2] http://freecode.com/projects/addrescue/releases/356852
> 
> 
> > Would there be a chance of you uploading the tarballs additionally
> > to the lzip compressed ones in some other format like xz?
> 
> Until five years ago I was making releases in a single format
> (bzip2). Then I switched to a dual format (gzip + lzip) as a
> transition to releasing again a single format (lzip). So the question
> is, for how long do you need me to continue making dual format
> releases? (Please, don't say "forever"). :-)

Well to be honest my intention was to request you providing the tarball
in another compressed format forever. IMHO lzip is a quite seldomly used
compression format for tarballs.
Furthermore Gentoo's package manager (portage) isn't capable of
extracting lzip compressed tarballs without further action being taken
inside of the build scripts (ebuilds). On the other hand portage can
easily extract gzip-, bzip2-, lzma- and xz-compressed tarballs as the
software which is needed to decompress such tarballs - unlike lzip -
gets installed on all Gentoo systems by default. So that and a bug
filed against Gentoo's ddrescue package[1] were my main motivations to
start this request.

[1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/485462

I think I gonna wait for ddrescue-1.18 to make a final decision on how
to resolve that bug properly. Right now I still tend to recompress the
ddrescue tarball. But that depends if forthcoming ddrescue-1.18 will
hard-depend on lzip or not.

> > Or in case you completely dislike that idea, would you be okay with
> > me providing xz-compressed tarballs of ddrescue from my Gentoo
> > dev-space?
> 
> That would be nice (aka "less work for me"). But why xz? Is there a 
> conspiration to "Force people to start migrating to xz-utils"[3]? ;-)
> 
> [3]http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/sys-apps/coreutils/ChangeLog

Since more and more upstream projects tend to provide their tarballs xz
compressed I assume that Gentoo was just jumping on the same
horse here. I mean even the linux kernel tarballs are now xz
compressed[2].

[2] ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.x/

> BTW, lzip compresses source tarballs a little more than xz.

That's good to know. Thanks for pointing that out. Maybe I can make
some people in Gentoo considering adding lzip to the tools which are
installed by default.

> Best regards,
> Antonio.

Once again thanks for your time and thanks for making ddresuce the
great tool it is right now :)

Kind regards
Lars

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