pkgtools and xz compressor

[Tim Kientzle]

b. f. wrote:
>> I notice FreeBSD 7.2's pkg_add, pkg_create, etc don't have support for
>> the xz compressor, evidently due to lack of support for the xz format
>> in bsdtar.  Does bsdtar support xz in FreeBSD 8.0?

If you have the xz port installed, yes.  If you have liblzma
installed, you can even recompile libarchive with native
xz support by following the comments in lib/libarchive/Makefile.

>>Failing that, is
>> xz support for the pkgtools something being looked at in future?

Yes, xz support is being looked at.

Lzma-family compression has been of interest for some
time but there have been a number of technical issues.
The "xz" format seems to address those but the software
is still in beta.  Once a final production version of
the xz software is available, I expect it to be imported
into FreeBSD-CURRENT fairly quickly.

Cheers,

Tim