[Haskell-cafe] Compressing GHC tarballs with LZMA

[John Goerzen]

Magnus Therning wrote:
> On 24/04/10 08:02, 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?
> 
> How common is support for .xz on the platforms we are interested in here?
> 
> I just passed a .tar.xz to a Mac user and got an email back that he couldn't
> unpack it.  Rather than dig deeper I just sent him a .tar.gz, so I don't know
> what tool he was using.

Not very.  dpkg may support it in the future, but that is a somewhat 
closed platform where Debian folks are in charge of both the archive and 
the tool used to unpack it.

I would be shocked to find xz preinstalled on a MacOS, AIX, or Solaris 
box.  That even goes for bzip2 on some of those platforms.

(At least we seem to be beyond the days when we still had to provide .Z 
files...)