Re: [kernel.org users] XZ Migration discussion

[Tom Rini]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 09:48:21AM +0100, Stefan Richter wrote:
> Pavel Machek wrote:
[snip]
> > No more windows systems
> > here. On android, gzip is supported, xzip is not. Debian machine
> > supports both, but gzip was preinstalled and I had to pull xzip. (This
> > does not help either:
> > 
> > root@amd:~# apt-cache search xzip
> > xzip - Interpreter of Infocom-format story-files
> 
> Considering that xz support is available even on niche systems like
> Amiga OS and BeOS (via p7zip if not by other means) and xz-utils proper
> build even on DOS, OpenVMS and other systems, how hard can it be to
> obtain an xz decompressor on Android, Debian, or Ubuntu¹?  (¹About which
> there was a note somewhere else in this thread that there is a conflict
> between xz-utils and lzma-utils... That's basically because the former
> supersede the latter.)

This, I think gets to one of the problems.  You're telling me that the
p7zip thing I installed for work is this .xz thing?  And it's really all
this LZMA algo?  That's part of the transition problem, folks quite
likely have access, easily, to a decompressor but don't know what it is
(.gz->gzip, .bz2 -> bzip2, .xz -> {p7zip, p7zip-full, xz-utils, ???}).

In fact, why not .lzma?  I'm assuming we're talking about the format,
and xz-utils nad p7zip and others all implement the same format and it's
all compatible and it's just a "how do we get there quickest / fastest"
kind of thing between the utils.

> The name confusion between xz-utils and xzip can be avoided if you
> search for the package in a package manager which shows package
> categories (archivers vs. games).

Actually, no, there's no 'xz-utils' in Debian/Lenny or Ubuntu 9.04, but
there is in 9.10.  But in 9.10, searching on xzip (a good, but
incorrect guess) only gives that.  Searching on xz shows xz-utils too.
At least with apt-cache, and since the desc doesn't list xzip (since
it's not xzip, it's an incorrect but not illogical guess), that
wouldn't help.

-- 
Tom Rini
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