[Haskell-cafe] Compressing GHC tarballs with LZMA

[Benoit T]

On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 11:02:35AM +0400, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> Hello Leon,
> 
> Saturday, April 24, 2010, 12:23:58 AM, you wrote:
> 
> > file nearly a third smaller.   Given that many modern variants of the
> > "tar" command support .tar.lzma files directly
> 
> isn't latest version of lzma-based compression use .xz extension?

.lzma is used for the format output by the "lzma" program that is now
deprecated.
It is recommended to use the newer xz container also based on the lzma
algorithm, hence the "xz" program and .xz extension.

Anyway, recent versions of gnu tar support both. Only xz benefits from a
short option, "-J", clearly favoring it over "--lzma".
One can also pipe xzcat to any version of tar, it's compatible with -J.

Cheers

-- 
Benoit Triquet <benoit.triquet at gmail.com>
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