Use of xz instead of gzip

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2011-Aug-10 11:06:07 +0800, Stephen Montgomery-Smith <stephen at missouri.edu> wrote:
>It seems that xz has much better compression than gzip.  How do people 
>feel about moving CTM to use xz instead of gzip?

Seems like a reasonable idea except for the 7.x issues.  Have you
considered bzip2?

>First, the attached patch needs to be applied to /usr/src.  (Any 
>committers willing to commit it?  It needs to MFC'ed rather quickly if I 
>start using xz.)

You're unlikely to find any here apart from yourself.

>Secondly, if your version of FreeBSD is old (like 7.x or older) you need 
>to install the archivers/xz port.  If you don't, when you attempt to 
>apply ctm to a "xz" compressed file, it replies with a rather helpful 
>message "xz not found."

I can see this presenting a problem on 7.x (and earlier, but they are
no longer supported) because the base system shouldn't have dependencies
on ports.  The options would seem to be:
1) Stick with gzip for 7-src and earlier (as well as ports until 7.x
   goes EOL)
2) Make ctm a port (so it can have a dependency on xz)
3) If dispensation is granted, ensure the dependency is documented in
   UPDATING and ctm.1 when it is MFC'd to 7.x and before.

And, of course, the commits containing the patch need to be distributed
before the format is changed (which creates issues for the xEmpty files
because they need to work on -RELEASE systems).

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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