[Slackbuilds-users] 13.1

[Ben Mendis]

For the sake of debate, only. (Please don't take offense at any of my
comments.)

On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 2:29 PM, Rob McGee <rob0 at slackbuilds.org> wrote:

> xz is a fine tool, possibly superior to gz in every way. But it has
> not been around as long.

"Linux is a fine tool, possibly superior to MS-DOS in every way. But it
has not been around as long."

Your argument appears to stipulate that we should prefer older solutions
even when the alternatives are superior in function.


> I run numerous older boxes, some of which
> are not likely to get upgraded soon if ever,

Ignoring the obvious security concern of not keeping your boxes updated, how
long are
the rest of us expected to wait for you to join to the 21st century? I'm
sure your situation
is common in this community (even I have a couple old installs on P3s),
however our
collective procrastination is holding back progress and potential. Setting
*some*
deadline and sticking to it will give people incentive to prepare their
systems for xz.
Otherwise people will procrastinate indefinitely and never be ready for it.

As for the space savings, with this discussion we have surely wasted
> more bytes than gz would ever waste.
>
For any given package, yes. But the aggregate savings would be more than
what
we've "wasted" so far.


>
> I say leave it as is, default to .tgz for $PKGTYPE.
>
It is _just_ a default. Changing the default won't prevent you from using
gz, but it will
encourage people to upgrade to xz.
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