Seems like it creates a bit of a chicken-and-egg dilemma towards ever migrating anyone to new formats.
I would argue that distribution of core internet data should never *drive* the adoption of new formats. Once a new format is widespread for other reasons, it makes perfect sense to adopt it. Important data that everyone needs to use should be as widely available as possible, which means using widely-adopted data formats. Debbie
On Sep 20, 2016, at 8:56 AM, Random832 <random832@fastmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Sep 20, 2016, at 11:24, Deborah Goldsmith wrote:
As far as I can tell, lzip is only used on Linux. There are no tools that ship with macOS or Windows (out of the box) that can decode it.
Doesn't ship with "Linux" out of the box, either. At least, on my machine it's not present and I've done nothing special to exclude it... Ubuntu has a half dozen packages for different versions of it (most of which seem to be in "universe" rather than the main distribution), with no clear guidance on which one I should want to install. [It's clear enough, to be fair, what the actual differences between them *are*, but it's not clear if these differences have any impact on performance or not, and overall I'm completely mystified at the decision to *package* them.]
Adopting lzip as the primary format at this point seems like a statement that only Linux matters.
While it seems to be a bit bleeding-edge, I don't see how it's less so for Linux than for other operating systems. Also I don't see why a "primary" format means that only platforms supporting that format, 'out of the box' or otherwise, matter, while other distribution formats are still fully supported. Seems like it creates a bit of a chicken-and-egg dilemma towards ever migrating anyone to new formats.