Re: support for lzip

[dherring]

> Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
>> * Antonio Diaz Diaz wrote on Tue, May 19, 2009 at 06:26:53PM CEST:
>>>Do you plan to support the creation of lzip-compressed tarballs?
>>>http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2008-11/msg00076.html
>>
>> Well, to be honest, I regard the addition of lzma support as a mistake
>> in hindsight.  We should have waited and added xz support only, with a
>> stable xz release.  It was also a mistake that I did not deprecate lzma
>> support more prominently in the 1.11 release; will fix that for 1.11.1.
>
> I agree that adding lzma_alone support was not a good idea. (Among other
> things, long term archiving of compressed data without integrity
> checking can easily produce undetected data corruption).
>
> What I ask myself is, given the excessive complexity of the xz-utils
> code and format, will we ever see a stable xz release? And even if a
> "stable" xz is released, how stable can it be given that xz uses the
> still in development LZMA2[1] algorithm?
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel-Ziv-Markov_chain_algorithm

FWIW, the xz website claims the format is now stable[1], tar has added -J
as a standard flag[2], and Slackware has bought heavily into the
format[3].  So support seems to be building fast.

[1] http://tukaani.org/xz/
[2] http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/
[3] "Fri May  8"
ftp://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/slackware/slackware-current/ChangeLog.txt

- Daniel