Feature changed by: Ruediger Meier (rudi_m) Feature #312439, revision 5 Title: spec files should support xz compressed sources per default Buildservice: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Desirable Requested by: Ruediger Meier (rudi_m) Partner organization: openSUSE.org Description: I think it's always good to hype xz compression, so doing it here for the build system. It should be possible to use xz compressed tar balls like bz2 or gz without having "BuildRequires xz" in every spec file. Also would be nice to add a note to the packaging guidelines that xz is the preferred compression over bz2 and gz. Maybe this way xz could slowly replace gz and bz2 as default compression for package sources. Todo: We need to add xz dependency to openSUSE:Factory's prjconf (and other projects?) and update some (meta) packages, like build, ... Don't know exactly the places where to change it globally. Business case (Partner benefit): openSUSE.org: 1. faster decompression than bz2 - less load on build servers 2. better compression ratio - less traffic / more speed when using osc commit, checkout, update, ... Discussion: #1: Ruediger Meier (rudi_m) (2011-10-19 12:34:08) There is another good reason to backport xz to old distros per default. Many factory packagers are using xz already for their sources. Users who want to clone such packages for recompiling on old distros have to re-pack the sources or need to clone xz/tar too. I've spent some time to make tar and xz packages very portable in Base: System. All we need is to include them into OBS distros somehow. #2: Jan Engelhardt (jengelh) (2011-10-19 23:07:21) See also https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=722602 Seems to take a looong time to add xz... + #3: Ruediger Meier (rudi_m) (2011-10-19 23:37:39) (reply to #2) + Yes, and if I had known that it's even a design problem to enable xz + sources on old distros per default (see + http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-buildservice/2011-10/msg00104.html (http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-buildservice/2011-10/msg00104.html) + ) then I had written an opposite feature request "don't allow xz + compressed sources on OBS". Because the xz BuildRequires often breaks + the common use case to link/clone packages for backporting easily to + older distros. + For now there is no benefit when using xz on OBS. I guess all existing + xz compressed sources are at least one time duplicated uploaded as + gz/bz2. Thus currently using xz will increase HD usage on OBS and waste + life time of packagers. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/312439