Use of xz instead of gzip

[Julian H. Stacey]

> 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)

(Not that I'm suggesting for or against Option 1, but it needs modifying,
Applying the same logic, append to Option 1: "as well as cvs-cur"
	(as cvs can be used to extract eg 4 & ports & doc as well as head).
As the ctm collection comprises:
	 cvs-cur ports-cur src-4 src-5 src-6 src-7 src-8 src-cur
Option 1 thus becomes "Stick with gzip for all except src-8 & src-cur"

Whether a CTM src-stable stream is EOL is irrelevant.
All that matters is whether extractor hosts have xz or not.
  One does not need to run ctm on same `uname -r` as one extracts for,
eg my CTM extractor runs on 8.3, but I extract for all of
	cvs-cur ports-cur src-4 src-5 src-6 src-7 src-8 src-cur
Some (4, maybe 6) have long been EOL, but I use them for reasons beyond
remit of this thread.


> 2) Make ctm a port (so it can have a dependency on xz)

I cant imagine many CTM users saying "please kick CTM out of src/" ;-)


> 3) If dispensation is granted,

Dispensation for what ?


>    ensure the dependency is documented in
>    UPDATING and ctm.1 when it is MFC'd to 7.x and before.

Man ctm says: "The ctm command appeared in FreeBSD 2.1"
In theory someone could be extracting on a really old host ?
We might be lucky & find all people are extracting on 8.x ?
We won't know unless we ask,
Stephen could request on ctm-announce@ eg:
  "People extracting CTM on old systems are requested to run 
	uname -r 
  & if not 8.something-RELEASE or current, report to .... at ....
  
Personaly, I'd think an acceptable middle course could be to switch to
whatever reduces the CTM bandwidth the most & put a note in man ctm:
	"If running FreeBSD-x or earlier you need to
	 cd /usr/ports/archivers/xz ; make install"

Cheers,
Julian
-- 
Julian Stacey, BSD Unix Linux C Sys Eng Consultants Munich http://berklix.com
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