[GSoC][Binaries support] Architecture

[Anders F Björklund]

Joshua Root wrote:

>> * Compressing packages: I think it's a good idea use liblzma, like
>> slackware and arch linux are doing. It has a great compression and low
>> decompression time, and cost only a little more for compressing than
>> usual.
> 
> Note that this would require the code to be added to base, since OS X
> doesn't ship with lzma/xz. What's the licensing situation with that?
> We'd really prefer to keep base fully BSD licensed.

All the extraction code needed (lzmadec, xzdec, liblzma) is in
the public domain. So it shouldn't be a problem, license-wise...

But if you don't want to make it a run-time/bin or build-time/lib
requirement, it does add some 30,000 lines of code to include it.


This, and inertia, was why I suggested using the existing ".tbz2".
There was some kind of similar argument for RMD-160, over SHA-256.

But even if it was to use .tgz and MD5, it would _still_ be an
improvement over having nothing. So use whatever gets it going ?

--anders