Re: Why aren't ELPA packages compressed?

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "Ulrich" == Ulrich Mueller <address@hidden> writes:

Ulrich> Some packages in ELPA have sizes around 5 MB, so I wonder why they can
Ulrich> only be downloaded as uncompressed tarballs?

Ulrich> Everything that is necessary to handle compressed files should already
Ulrich> be there in Emacs.

When I wrote package.el, one goal was that installing a package would
not require any external tool.  So, e.g., that is why I chose tar
archives and not some other format -- tar-mode.el can unpack them
without a helper.

>From NEWS I see that zlib was added in 24.  So, that's the reason -- at
the time it wasn't available.  It sounds like it is optional, though,
which seems like a problem for users.

Tom