Using lzip instead of xz for distributed tarballs

[Ben Gamari]

On January 21, 2020 11:44:15 AM EST, Vanessa McHale <vamchale at gmail.com> wrote:
>Would it be plausible to distribute both? That way users would not have
>to install lzip.
>
>Cheers,
>Vanessa McHale
>
>> On Jan 20, 2020, at 4:15 PM, Ben Gamari <ben at well-typed.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Vanessa McHale <vamchale at gmail.com> writes:
>> 
>>> Hello all,
>>> 
>>> 
>>> GHC is distributed as .tar.xz tarballs; I assume this is because it
>>> produces small tarballs. However, xz is ill-suited for archiving due
>to
>>> its lack of error recovery. Moreover, lzip produces smaller tarballs
>>> with GHC (I tested with ghc-8.8.2-x86_64-deb9-linux.tar) and
>>> decompression takes about the same amount of time.
>>> 
>> Indeed I recall seeing the "Why xz is not suitable for archival
>> purposes" blog post quite a while ago and considered moving away from
>xz
>> at the time but wasn't entirely convinced that the benefits would
>> justify the churn, especially since xz tends to be pretty ubiquitous
>at
>> this point while lzip is a fair bit less so.
>> 
>> I'd be happy to hear further reasons why we should switch but I'll
>admit
>> that I still don't quite see what switching would buy us; we do have
>> a few backups spread across the planet so the probability of us
>having
>> to rely on the compressor for error recovery pretty small.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> 
>> - Ben
>
>_______________________________________________
>ghc-devs mailing list
>ghc-devs at haskell.org
>http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs

There is indeed precedent for this. IIRC, we distributed both bzip2 and xz tarballs for several years.

I'm not opposed to offering both, the biggest cost is the storage and that is relatively minor. I have opened #17726 to track this.

Cheers,

- Ben