Thoughts on switching our archive compression method

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Sep 24, 2020, at 08:39, Lothar Haeger wrote:
> 
> Reading "xz" and "archive" in the same sentence reminds me of https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html
> 
> While it's easy to read the above as a rant of a disappointed competitor, he seems to make some valid points about why lzma/xz should be avoided, especially for long term archival purposes.

Thanks for pointing out that article. I wasn't aware of it or the deficiencies in the xz format that it alleges exist.

It sounds like lzip might be a better format, but macOS tar / libarchive doesn't know how to decompress lzip files, and lzip is GPL-2+ licensed so I would be wary about bundling it with MacPorts which is BSD licensed.