Re:Xz format inadequate for long-term archiving
by jl6 on Saturday October 22, 2016 @03:04PM
(#12770079)
Were there many prominent open source projects using the LZMA format before the creation of xz? Debian, for example (which is where this particular flamefest originates), adopted[0] xz the year following the stable v5.0.0 of XZ-Utils[1].
My impression was that the whole 7zip->p7zip->lzma_alone->xz journey was concluded before any "xz hype" began.
[0] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2011/08/msg00...
Re:Xz format inadequate for long-term archiving
by saurik on Monday October 24, 2016 @03:12PM
(#12781864)
I don't quite understand the timeline you are drawing here but the Debian Package Manager is a perfect example of a prominent open source project which used the LZMA format before the creation of xz. They recently shifted to "deprecate" the LZMA format, a change which I have removed from the negligible fork of dpkg I ship to the tens of millions of people running Cydia.
No: that's why the LZMA compression format was chosen, and why the .lzma container format temporarily became popular as people started using lzma-tools. The move to xz, which results in slightly larger files for seemingly arbitrary reasons and which technically provides one benefit (seekability) almost everyone defeats (by compressing a tar file) while using the same relying on the same underlying compression algorithm is less-well motivated.