[oe] [RFC] Preferring tar.bz2 over tar.gz if there's a choice

[Justin Patrin]

On 10/20/06, Paul Sokolovsky <pmiscml at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello openembedded-devel,
>
>   Nowadays, with multimegabyte software downloads, many projects
> provide both tar.bz2 and tar.gz archives for downloads. I'd like to
> make a proposal that we prefer tar.bz2 over .gz for obvious reason of
> saving bandwidth and disk space for lots of people using OE. In
> particular, I'd like to propose that it's ok to change .gz to .bz2 if
> such case is spotted.
>
>   We should be reasonably safe with this, as gzip can be considered
> pretty well a legacy archiver for big downloads now. The projects
> which started use bzip2 hardly give it up. And of course, many
> projects alreday use bzip2 solely, so it's not like adding a new
> dependency for OE.
>
>   Specifically, I have such patches for gdb_6.4 and libxml2_2.6.26 now
> in my tree.
>
>   (One would ask - why do I care up to the level of patchuing existing
> recipes? I'm exactly one of bandwidth-challenged, so try to use cheap
> local mirrors, and the mirrors of course usually have .bz2. I checked
> taht upstream actually provides .bz2, of course.)
>

What exactly are you referring to? Which distributed files? OE doesn't
really distribute anything but an OE db and that's one-time downloaded
when starting.

If you mean the images distributed from OE, that's a distribution
choice and OZ in particular can't just make the choice to switch
without adding a static binary of bzip2 (for flashing) and changing
its flashing script.

-- 
Justin Patrin