Re: [sysvinit-devel] Switch release tarballs to xz

[Jesse Smith]

> Hi Jesse,
>
> I request to as the maintainer of sysvinit to reject this change.
> Please do not do that, xz is not well-designed.  See:
>
> http://lzip.nongnu.org/xz_inadequate.html

I looked over the linked document and the discussion Guillem mentioned
on the Debian mailing list. I have a few thoughts on this debate.

1. The linked document seems to be as politically motivated as it is
technically motivated. And, having been on the receiving end of this
propaganda effort at another project where similar claims were debunked,
I am disinclined to believe the author's conclusions.

2. Guillem is right, the concerns raised in the Debian bug reports and
mailing lists were shown to be baseless.

3. The xz compression software is used by many projects, including
several Linux distributions, which means it is used to compress a lot of
packages, probably well over a million archives. If the document linked
above were accurate we could expect there to be thousands of examples of
unrecoverable archives, even if corruption was a problem less than 0.1%
of the time. This does not appear to be the case. Even if it were, we
can always create new archives from the git tree.

4. I tested xz against our current bzip2 compression and xz does produce
smaller archives, making it a more appealing option.

Given the above points, I am inclined to switch to xz, unless there is a
neutral party that has evidence that using xz results in data loss more
often than should be expected from plain file system corruption?

- Jesse