Using xz by default for compression

[Rainer Müller]

On 2015-01-25 22:27, René J.V. Bertin wrote:
> I'm not working on patches because the support is already there, and
> requires a point edit in macports.conf to be activated. I'm not
> familiar with installer development, otherwise I'd propose a patch
> presenting the user with the choice between xz (slower but more
> space-efficient compression) and bzip2.

The transition from one compression format to another would most
definitely require patches to handle local .tar.bz2 archives and also
download new .tar.xz archives.

There is no /usr/bin/xz on my OS X 10.10 Yosemite. If we want to switch,
the xz utility would have to be shipped with MacPorts base. Is the
higher compression worth the effort to maintain another dependency in
our repository?

Also, as this is all about saving disk space, I would like to point to a
patch using the builtin HFS compression when available. This patch was
submitted by Michael Feiri (mfeiri@) in multiple revisions already. It
does not introduce new dependencies and most probably saves way more
disk space than compressing the archives with another algorithm.

http://trac.macports.org/ticket/36560

Rainer